6 ms·

There are reasons NFC isn't taking off. 1) It's a technology, not a feature. Many companies, mostly Android handset makers but also Blackberry and Nokia, have

by geuis 13y ago

There are reasons NFC isn't taking off. 1) It's a technology, not a feature. Many companies, mostly Android handset makers but also Blackberry and Nokia, have included it in their devices as "yet another selling point". It was included not as a way to make a better device or experience for customers, but as a gimmick for upselling handsets. 2) It's insecure. Holy hell, Batman. Just spend a couple minutes reading through the security section of the NFC Wikipedia entry. It's insanely easy to read transactions remotely, modify data, and jam signals. Even more, there is no hint of security built into the technology. None. No RF signal modification detection, no encryption. 3) Unreliable. While it sounds like a good idea on paper, for the most part it just doesn't work very well in practice. There's too many subpar implementations in too many devices. Just because you have a good one in your handset doesn't help when most of the limited ones available in public are cheap. There's a damn good reason Apple hasn't included NFC. It's broken. They definitely put out crappy products from time to time (don't forget Ping, iPod socks, Maps, Siri, MobileMe, and about 300 variations of the Mac before Jobs came back). But NFC hasn't proven to be something useful or valuable. They won't include it. Perhaps something like it in the future, but never NFC in its current form.

mkolodny 13y ago
Those all sound like great reasons for Google to buy a company who's been hacking on the problem successfully.
kmfrk 13y ago
At this point, it's clear that Apple won't include NFC after declaring it dead at their iPhone keynote: http://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/with-ibeacon-apple-is-going-to-dump-on-nfc-and-embrace-the-internet-of-things/ http://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/with-ibeacon-apple-is-going-to-....
- bcoates 13y ago
  Tech product messaging 101: Every technology you don't support is dead and useless, unless you're FUDding about how much better your vaporware version is than everyone else's actually existing product.
Goopplesoft 13y ago
Interestingly when Johny Ive was saying "It's not just rampant technology for technology's sake. Every single component, every process has been considered and measured to make sure that its truly useful and it actually enhances the user experience" in the new 5s introduction videos, it reminded me of NFC specifically. For many reasons that you listed this otherwise cool technology is not yet ready. Source: http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/#video-touch http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/#video-touch
- nicholassmith 13y ago
  Yeah NFC and a few other things came to mind when he talked about it. It's an interesting technology but it's just not big enough to make it worth the development time on including it into their devices, but from what I've heard from someone who worked for a large UK phone company Apple did actually accidentally release SKU details that listed NFC, only for it to be missing in action at release. I'm sure they've explored it before declaring it dead in the water.
dwrtz 13y ago
I would just like to point out that NFC is doing well in China, and in Hong Kong it's used brilliantly (public transportation, payments). I think the reason it hasn't caught on here is because municipalities, malls, theme parks, etc., haven't embraced the technology, so there's no need for it to be in our phones.
- angryasian 13y ago
  I can't understand how any of original commenters points are poignant when its a proven technology deployed in large scale in many asian countries. If security and unreliability was an issue, why is it still widespread and adopted in all these countries, and these examples have proven its much more than a feature.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Metric system, Tankless water heaters, Anime, Rice cooker appliances, cheap competitive cell phone service, cheap competitive broadband. Its not exactly the first thing to work great in Asia and not sell in the USA.
    - angryasian 13y ago
      cultural differences still doesn't make any of the commenters points relevant. Theres a better comment higher up explaining security.
- geuis 13y ago
  I have been looking around for accounts of NFC being as successful as you and other people claim. I'm not refuting your argument, just asking for clarification. The top search results for "nfc asia" and "nfc hong kong" mainly return press releases and news articles about how NFC is being rolled out. In fact, most of the ones I found are as recent as July and August. There was one older story from April 2011 talking about "hundreds of field trials" but no follow-on detail. I'm not doubting that certain markets in major Asian cities have seen NFC rollouts. But I question a) the scale and b) the public reception. Indeed, since smart phones are still catching on in major markets in many Asian markets I am doubtful of how wide-spread NFC adoption actually can be. I'd love to see some specific stories that refute my point of view.
tjohns 13y ago
NFC supports encryption, which solves the eavesdropping and unauthorized modification problems. It's done at the card level as an optional feature, since not all applications need encryption. MIFARE DESFire comes to mind as one of the more popular cards with encryption, though I do recall there's others as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device. The only time I've ever had it not work was back when phones with non-NXP chipsets first started to appear on the market, and some folks were still selling standalone tags that used NXP's older proprietary format (MIFARE Classic) rather than the standardized format (NFC Forum). That's rarely a problem these days.
- yasth 13y ago
  I don't think geuis is saying the actual communication is unreliable, but the actions are. I.e. the NFC part works, but the whole touch to share (say a video or whatever) part has more troubles. Which is a problem even though it is just a failing of handling things hugher up the stack it makes it look like NFC is problematic.
  - tjohns 13y ago
    That's a fair point. The lower level stuff and NDEF format is well standardized. The higher level operations are not nearly as well standardised right now, even more so when you're dealing with large files, which will require a handoff to Bluetooth or WiFi Direct. In NFC's defense, it's only recently (4.2, Jelly Bean) that Android even supported transferring large files via Bluetooth handoff, so hopefully that stuff will improve with time.
    - geuis 13y ago
      Fair point too. I hope it does improve in time.
- ProAm 13y ago
  > And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device I've personally never had it work. I tried twice with different two phones (Motorola and Samsung) and while it did recognize it was supposed to do something NFC-esque, the data never transferred. At that point I gave up and just swapped SD-cards and manually copied the data over. Just my experience but I'm not interested in trying again when there are other methods that I know will transfer data guaranteed to work.
Pxtl 13y ago
I think NFC is missing its mark - to me, the obvious use for NFC isn't device-to-device connections and sending files and all that, but for peripherals. One-step bluetooth pairing with an NFC tag would be lovely, right? Just bump-and-pair. For gaming - imagine a game console with mix-and-match one-handed controllers. Trackballs, joysticks, pointers, keyboards, mice, etc. Bump them together to tell the console "I'm using the whamblefloog with the xorchball" so it can tie each disparate controller to the concept of a two-handed player.
- tjohns 13y ago
  Bluetooth pairing via NFC is starting to appear in a few devices. Off the top of my head, Monoprice has a bluetooth audio receiver that has this feature, as does a Parrott's bluetooth headphones.
  - sciwiz 13y ago
    Almost all of Sony's accessories, even the lens cameras, have tap to pair.
nerderloo 13y ago
It isn't taking off in North Amercia. In Japan, people use phone to pay for public transit.
- dgudkov 13y ago
  That's not exactly true. In Canada government-backed Interac Flash [1] made many merchants accept NFC-enabled cards (debit and credit). I personally use it quite often (e.g. when buying groceries at Metro stores) and not only is it convenient for customers, but also I'm sure it has strong business case and good ROI for the merchants since it allows serving customers faster with shorter lines and fewer cachiers. [1] http://www.interac.ca/en/interac-flash/interac-flash-for-consumers http://www.interac.ca/en/interac-flash/interac-flash-for-con...
- nandemo 13y ago
  > In Japan, people use phone to pay for public transit And vending machines, and convenience stores, etc.
- slowmotiony 13y ago
  I can't exactly speak for the entire Europe, but in Poland almost everybody has a Visa PayPass card, and you can pay with them pretty much everywhere now. It is also not uncommon to see someone pay with his NFC-enabled phone.
loceng 13y ago
The efficiencies that NFC brings are worth the possible security issues that exist and can be dealt with afterward.
VLM 13y ago
In the eternal wheel of IT nothing is ever new. NFC is just IRDA without line of site problems. As if that was the main user problem with IRDA LOL thats probably the only thing that wasn't broken with IRDA. Everything is playing out exactly the same way, as it always does. I would be willing to bet, in the eternal rotation of the IT wheel, that the next revolution will be something very much like IRDA in your google glass glasses. Of course it'll be hampered by incompatibility, relatively low uptake, unreliable software, insecurity, probably only supported by certain platforms, and probably an awful and difficult to use UI, so it'll die out. To be replaced by more or less identical short range RF "solution" (and guess how that will turn out?) There's no reason short range IR or RF can't work at the hardware level. No reason a unified, generic, stable standard can't exist. Other than the whole, lack of need thing. Look how well bluetooth and wifi work using basically the same technology... because they solved actual problems.
hamburglar 13y ago
Agreed about #3 especially. My wife and I both recently got NFC-capable phones and we can allegedly send photos and contacts back and forth, but there seem to be severe problems at both the basic communication level (it is extremely difficult to get the two devices to even make the NFC handshake because the NFC antennas need to be aligned so ridiculously precisely), and at the application level (once you actually manage to get them to beep and communicate, Windows Phone and Android apparently don't agree on content types or something, because you just get errors saying the content type isn't supported). For a technology that's supposed to make sharing data so quick and easy, it seems like a really bad sign that I have not been able to make it work even once, despite sitting there fiddling with it for probably 20 minutes. It's like someone looked at the extremely painful and ill-defined bluetooth pairing user experience and said, "yeah, that's a good starting point, but let's make it a little more frustrating."
blub 13y ago
I think your statements are misleading, and make the technology look worse than it seems. Apple and the US market aren't the entire universe. NFC is already used in other countries for secure communication (payments, ID, etc), but that's not even one of the most interesting aspects of it. I will stick to Bump, since that's the subject of the topic: when I checked a couple of years ago, their way of connecting two devices was primitive and rather insecure, it was essentially a heuristic that used several parameters to guess which two users "bumped". NFC would have solved the problem perfectly, with no network communication needed and 100% user-to-user match rate.
shawn-butler 13y ago
I'm fairly certain Bump doesn't even use NFC. I'm not even sure what this comment has to do with the story. Am I way off? They (were?) using a patented algorithm working on accelerometer signals to figure out which devices were being "bumped" together server-side.
- xerophtye 13y ago
  Yeah I am confused too after seeing all the discussion on NFC. I thought Bump uses the accelerometer (and thus works on the iphone too). SO where did NFC come in all of this?
klausa 13y ago
Just curious - why are iPod Socks in 'crappy products' group? I thought they looked awesome and were actually useful - yeah, they were kinda overpriced, but hey, Apple. Are iPod Socks really considered a failed product?
- geuis 13y ago
  Because they were silly. Sure, a modest amount sold but they were generally regarded as a laughable product. This was largely because they were debuted by Jobs, who we expected to only personally show off serious items.

by geuis 13y ago

mkolodny 13y ago

Those all sound like great reasons for Google to buy a company who's been hacking on the problem successfully.

kmfrk 13y ago

At this point, it's clear that Apple won't include NFC after declaring it dead at their iPhone keynote: http://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/with-ibeacon-apple-is-going-to-dump-on-nfc-and-embrace-the-internet-of-things/ http://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/with-ibeacon-apple-is-going-to-....

bcoates 13y ago
Tech product messaging 101: Every technology you don't support is dead and useless, unless you're FUDding about how much better your vaporware version is than everyone else's actually existing product.

Goopplesoft 13y ago

Interestingly when Johny Ive was saying "It's not just rampant technology for technology's sake. Every single component, every process has been considered and measured to make sure that its truly useful and it actually enhances the user experience" in the new 5s introduction videos, it reminded me of NFC specifically. For many reasons that you listed this otherwise cool technology is not yet ready. Source: http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/#video-touch http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/#video-touch

nicholassmith 13y ago
Yeah NFC and a few other things came to mind when he talked about it. It's an interesting technology but it's just not big enough to make it worth the development time on including it into their devices, but from what I've heard from someone who worked for a large UK phone company Apple did actually accidentally release SKU details that listed NFC, only for it to be missing in action at release. I'm sure they've explored it before declaring it dead in the water.

dwrtz 13y ago

I would just like to point out that NFC is doing well in China, and in Hong Kong it's used brilliantly (public transportation, payments). I think the reason it hasn't caught on here is because municipalities, malls, theme parks, etc., haven't embraced the technology, so there's no need for it to be in our phones.

angryasian 13y ago
I can't understand how any of original commenters points are poignant when its a proven technology deployed in large scale in many asian countries. If security and unreliability was an issue, why is it still widespread and adopted in all these countries, and these examples have proven its much more than a feature.
- VLM 13y ago
  Metric system, Tankless water heaters, Anime, Rice cooker appliances, cheap competitive cell phone service, cheap competitive broadband. Its not exactly the first thing to work great in Asia and not sell in the USA.
  - angryasian 13y ago
    cultural differences still doesn't make any of the commenters points relevant. Theres a better comment higher up explaining security.
geuis 13y ago
I have been looking around for accounts of NFC being as successful as you and other people claim. I'm not refuting your argument, just asking for clarification. The top search results for "nfc asia" and "nfc hong kong" mainly return press releases and news articles about how NFC is being rolled out. In fact, most of the ones I found are as recent as July and August. There was one older story from April 2011 talking about "hundreds of field trials" but no follow-on detail. I'm not doubting that certain markets in major Asian cities have seen NFC rollouts. But I question a) the scale and b) the public reception. Indeed, since smart phones are still catching on in major markets in many Asian markets I am doubtful of how wide-spread NFC adoption actually can be. I'd love to see some specific stories that refute my point of view.

tjohns 13y ago

NFC supports encryption, which solves the eavesdropping and unauthorized modification problems. It's done at the card level as an optional feature, since not all applications need encryption. MIFARE DESFire comes to mind as one of the more popular cards with encryption, though I do recall there's others as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device. The only time I've ever had it not work was back when phones with non-NXP chipsets first started to appear on the market, and some folks were still selling standalone tags that used NXP's older proprietary format (MIFARE Classic) rather than the standardized format (NFC Forum). That's rarely a problem these days.

yasth 13y ago
I don't think geuis is saying the actual communication is unreliable, but the actions are. I.e. the NFC part works, but the whole touch to share (say a video or whatever) part has more troubles. Which is a problem even though it is just a failing of handling things hugher up the stack it makes it look like NFC is problematic.
- tjohns 13y ago
  That's a fair point. The lower level stuff and NDEF format is well standardized. The higher level operations are not nearly as well standardised right now, even more so when you're dealing with large files, which will require a handoff to Bluetooth or WiFi Direct. In NFC's defense, it's only recently (4.2, Jelly Bean) that Android even supported transferring large files via Bluetooth handoff, so hopefully that stuff will improve with time.
  - geuis 13y ago
    Fair point too. I hope it does improve in time.
ProAm 13y ago
> And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device I've personally never had it work. I tried twice with different two phones (Motorola and Samsung) and while it did recognize it was supposed to do something NFC-esque, the data never transferred. At that point I gave up and just swapped SD-cards and manually copied the data over. Just my experience but I'm not interested in trying again when there are other methods that I know will transfer data guaranteed to work.

Pxtl 13y ago

I think NFC is missing its mark - to me, the obvious use for NFC isn't device-to-device connections and sending files and all that, but for peripherals. One-step bluetooth pairing with an NFC tag would be lovely, right? Just bump-and-pair. For gaming - imagine a game console with mix-and-match one-handed controllers. Trackballs, joysticks, pointers, keyboards, mice, etc. Bump them together to tell the console "I'm using the whamblefloog with the xorchball" so it can tie each disparate controller to the concept of a two-handed player.

tjohns 13y ago
Bluetooth pairing via NFC is starting to appear in a few devices. Off the top of my head, Monoprice has a bluetooth audio receiver that has this feature, as does a Parrott's bluetooth headphones.
- sciwiz 13y ago
  Almost all of Sony's accessories, even the lens cameras, have tap to pair.

nerderloo 13y ago

It isn't taking off in North Amercia. In Japan, people use phone to pay for public transit.

dgudkov 13y ago
That's not exactly true. In Canada government-backed Interac Flash [1] made many merchants accept NFC-enabled cards (debit and credit). I personally use it quite often (e.g. when buying groceries at Metro stores) and not only is it convenient for customers, but also I'm sure it has strong business case and good ROI for the merchants since it allows serving customers faster with shorter lines and fewer cachiers. [1] http://www.interac.ca/en/interac-flash/interac-flash-for-consumers http://www.interac.ca/en/interac-flash/interac-flash-for-con...
nandemo 13y ago
> In Japan, people use phone to pay for public transit And vending machines, and convenience stores, etc.
slowmotiony 13y ago
I can't exactly speak for the entire Europe, but in Poland almost everybody has a Visa PayPass card, and you can pay with them pretty much everywhere now. It is also not uncommon to see someone pay with his NFC-enabled phone.

loceng 13y ago

The efficiencies that NFC brings are worth the possible security issues that exist and can be dealt with afterward.

VLM 13y ago

In the eternal wheel of IT nothing is ever new. NFC is just IRDA without line of site problems. As if that was the main user problem with IRDA LOL thats probably the only thing that wasn't broken with IRDA. Everything is playing out exactly the same way, as it always does. I would be willing to bet, in the eternal rotation of the IT wheel, that the next revolution will be something very much like IRDA in your google glass glasses. Of course it'll be hampered by incompatibility, relatively low uptake, unreliable software, insecurity, probably only supported by certain platforms, and probably an awful and difficult to use UI, so it'll die out. To be replaced by more or less identical short range RF "solution" (and guess how that will turn out?) There's no reason short range IR or RF can't work at the hardware level. No reason a unified, generic, stable standard can't exist. Other than the whole, lack of need thing. Look how well bluetooth and wifi work using basically the same technology... because they solved actual problems.

hamburglar 13y ago

Agreed about #3 especially. My wife and I both recently got NFC-capable phones and we can allegedly send photos and contacts back and forth, but there seem to be severe problems at both the basic communication level (it is extremely difficult to get the two devices to even make the NFC handshake because the NFC antennas need to be aligned so ridiculously precisely), and at the application level (once you actually manage to get them to beep and communicate, Windows Phone and Android apparently don't agree on content types or something, because you just get errors saying the content type isn't supported). For a technology that's supposed to make sharing data so quick and easy, it seems like a really bad sign that I have not been able to make it work even once, despite sitting there fiddling with it for probably 20 minutes. It's like someone looked at the extremely painful and ill-defined bluetooth pairing user experience and said, "yeah, that's a good starting point, but let's make it a little more frustrating."

blub 13y ago

I think your statements are misleading, and make the technology look worse than it seems. Apple and the US market aren't the entire universe. NFC is already used in other countries for secure communication (payments, ID, etc), but that's not even one of the most interesting aspects of it. I will stick to Bump, since that's the subject of the topic: when I checked a couple of years ago, their way of connecting two devices was primitive and rather insecure, it was essentially a heuristic that used several parameters to guess which two users "bumped". NFC would have solved the problem perfectly, with no network communication needed and 100% user-to-user match rate.

shawn-butler 13y ago

I'm fairly certain Bump doesn't even use NFC. I'm not even sure what this comment has to do with the story. Am I way off? They (were?) using a patented algorithm working on accelerometer signals to figure out which devices were being "bumped" together server-side.

xerophtye 13y ago
Yeah I am confused too after seeing all the discussion on NFC. I thought Bump uses the accelerometer (and thus works on the iphone too). SO where did NFC come in all of this?

klausa 13y ago

Just curious - why are iPod Socks in 'crappy products' group? I thought they looked awesome and were actually useful - yeah, they were kinda overpriced, but hey, Apple. Are iPod Socks really considered a failed product?

geuis 13y ago
Because they were silly. Sure, a modest amount sold but they were generally regarded as a laughable product. This was largely because they were debuted by Jobs, who we expected to only personally show off serious items.