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That’s thanks to Android phone manufacturers, which don’t want to pay for a global license for the NFC tech involved. Apple on the other hand does pay for a glo

That’s thanks to Android phone manufacturers, which don’t want to pay for a global license for the NFC tech involved. Apple on the other hand does pay for a global license and so iPhones and Apple Watches from anywhere work perfectly with Japanese cash card terminals. I use a digital Suica on my US iPhone during my visits. Supposedly Pixels have the requisite hardware, but Google software locks the functionality to Japan. Some have been able to hack their Pixels to force it on but from what I’ve gathered it’s flaky when you do that.

seabass-labrax 1y ago
Why should they pay for a licence? Once a technology reaches such ubiquity, there's a strong case for it being part of the technical infrastructure of that society. To me, that means that governments have a responsibility to ensure that the technology is widely available, and arbitrarily locking it behind commercial licences does not help achieve that. To the extent that patents and licensing provide an incentive to develop such technology, it's beholden on governments to foot the R&D bill in some other way.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  I see your point, but at the same time fracturing product lines into a million micro-SKUs also isn’t great and should be discouraged.
- lmz 1y ago
  Using this sort of logic Windows would be mandatory and paid for by the government on all your 90s, 2000s laptops.
decimalenough 1y ago
The "standard" in question here is NTT Docomo's Osaifu-Keitai, which is used only in Japan and requires both licensing and a special flavor of Sony's Felica chip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai I can't really fault Android manufacturers for not wanting to pay extra for every phone in the world to get a bit of proprietary tech that's completely useless outside Japan.
- fendy3002 1y ago
  No surprises here, it's Sony. The same company that use propertiary memory card on PS Vita.
  - LocalH 1y ago
    The same company that has a weird dichotomy between sometimes using other industry-standard data formats, but at times either succeeding (UMatic, Betacam, Professional Disc, Video8/Hi8) and sometimes failing (Betamax, Memory Stick) to have a dominant media storage standard. And sometimes they have products that accept industry standard formats (I have an older prosumer camera from Sony that supports SD, Memory Stick Pro Duo, and a proprietary flash format that is mostly used to record two formats at once, and they made plenty of VHS VCRs).
Brian_K_White 1y ago
Why the F should an interoperability fundamental like NFC require any such thing as a license in the first place??? It's utterly absurd to have ever allowed such a condition, despite it being a fact that everyone has been just living with for decades. If there is a problem, it is very definitely not thanks to anyone failing to pay a license.
- Shank 1y ago
  FeliCa isn't NFC -- it's a close standard but it's technically different enough and has different requirements that it has licensing attached because it wasn't made freely available. It's technically also called "NFC-F". FeliCa predates NFC's wide adoption in consumer electronic devices because it was in use in Japan in the early 2000's.
cosmotic 1y ago
What do the international android phones support and does it require licensing?

seabass-labrax 1y ago

Why should they pay for a licence? Once a technology reaches such ubiquity, there's a strong case for it being part of the technical infrastructure of that society. To me, that means that governments have a responsibility to ensure that the technology is widely available, and arbitrarily locking it behind commercial licences does not help achieve that. To the extent that patents and licensing provide an incentive to develop such technology, it's beholden on governments to foot the R&D bill in some other way.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
I see your point, but at the same time fracturing product lines into a million micro-SKUs also isn’t great and should be discouraged.
lmz 1y ago
Using this sort of logic Windows would be mandatory and paid for by the government on all your 90s, 2000s laptops.

decimalenough 1y ago

The "standard" in question here is NTT Docomo's Osaifu-Keitai, which is used only in Japan and requires both licensing and a special flavor of Sony's Felica chip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai I can't really fault Android manufacturers for not wanting to pay extra for every phone in the world to get a bit of proprietary tech that's completely useless outside Japan.

fendy3002 1y ago
No surprises here, it's Sony. The same company that use propertiary memory card on PS Vita.
- LocalH 1y ago
  The same company that has a weird dichotomy between sometimes using other industry-standard data formats, but at times either succeeding (UMatic, Betacam, Professional Disc, Video8/Hi8) and sometimes failing (Betamax, Memory Stick) to have a dominant media storage standard. And sometimes they have products that accept industry standard formats (I have an older prosumer camera from Sony that supports SD, Memory Stick Pro Duo, and a proprietary flash format that is mostly used to record two formats at once, and they made plenty of VHS VCRs).

Brian_K_White 1y ago

Why the F should an interoperability fundamental like NFC require any such thing as a license in the first place??? It's utterly absurd to have ever allowed such a condition, despite it being a fact that everyone has been just living with for decades. If there is a problem, it is very definitely not thanks to anyone failing to pay a license.

Shank 1y ago
FeliCa isn't NFC -- it's a close standard but it's technically different enough and has different requirements that it has licensing attached because it wasn't made freely available. It's technically also called "NFC-F". FeliCa predates NFC's wide adoption in consumer electronic devices because it was in use in Japan in the early 2000's.

cosmotic 1y ago

What do the international android phones support and does it require licensing?