I’m trying to move away from Google and other big tech corporations as much as I can without sacrificing practicality but it seems like the only way to make contactless payments is with stock android on a Google approved device.
Is there any alternative out there that would allow me to make contactless payments without these conditions met? (For example, if I put grapheneos on my phone)
There are other payment solutions. I have never used them and do not know how widely they are accepted. Maybe Paypal, Venmo, and Square have POS solutions. I do not think they are NFC. Maybe QR-code based? This is from memory. Maybe someone else knows more.
But yes beyond the ones people talked about, crypto, and the three I mentioned I am not sure there are any others in the US.
The Indian UPI System is a pretty great for this. I wish more countries adopted it/built something similar instead of relying on corporations.
Oh damn that’s awesome go India.
You would hope tech like that would eventually propogate to the rest of the world but doesn’t seem like anyone with money really cares about the wants and needs of consumers (and existing contactless systems already make it easier than ever for people to fork over their cash) so it probably won’t
Everything in the banking / point of sale space requires certification, thus there are few solutions that enter the space as it is a slow costly process that involves payment processors and banks.
- use the original cards
- Apple Pay
- Google Pay
- Samsung pay
- a few others
- various NFC cloning tools that will raise eyebrows at the checkout (flipper zero)
Banks in the US often do not provide contactless cards. Contactless payments are only starting to gain some traction since the pandemic… beforehand it was pretty rare, at least on the east coast (I get the sense that other regions of the country were better about this). It is actually madness, though.
Big banks have been contactless is mostly the smaller banks. The bigger reason is for ease of access or reduced wallet size. If you have multiple credit cards or store cards you don’t have to carry them all around with you…
This has not been my experience at all. I’ve had tap for over a decade in Canada, and large banks in the US here did not give me contactless cards a few year ago. In the past couple of years they seem to be rolling out more of them, but people always looked at me like I was a lunatic whenever I tried to tap my Canadian card to pay for something.
Just use a wallet. How is this even a question?
