I'm not sure the "reliance" on having the phone was as much on businesses as on your friend though. Every time I've been in NYC in the last 2 years, I've made 2

I'm not sure the "reliance" on having the phone was as much on businesses as on your friend though. Every time I've been in NYC in the last 2 years, I've made 2-3 paper copies of my vaccination card for exactly the reason, and have been rewarded a few times when places wouldn't accept a photo of a card, and only a physical paper one. Obviously it sucked for you and your friend to have to deal with that, but it seems wrong to blame the city and its systems for it. If anything, NYC had plenty of room for you to have a non-phone fallback that you just didn't have. Compared to SF especially, NYC is, if anything, one of the more analog big cities in the US. There's tons of cash-only stores and restaurants, and they're seemingly the last city in the US to now be moving away from mag-stripe for their public transit.