Fortunately, phones never get lost. Or broken. Or stolen. Or discharge. Or malfunction. Or lock people out for no good reason.
I can put a $100 bill through the washing machine and it's still perfectly usable. When I can do that with a phone, maybe I'll switch.
I ran a credit card through the washer and dryer last month, and even though it got bent, and the stripe doesn't work anymore, the chip does. And the numbers can be punched into a POS terminal if all else fails.
E-wallets are putting your finances into a single point of failure. Tech people should know better.
I mean, you can always log into that WeChat account from another device... your WeChat username and password are maybe a bit more secure than all those numbers printed ostentatiously on your card, but are they really that different?
What other device? If I'm out and about and my phone gets stolen, broken, or even the battery just runs out, how do I pay for my transit ride home, where I -- maybe -- have a backup device?
This is the -- pretty common -- failure case I worry about. And yes, I know it's also possible for physical wallets to be stolen. But cash doesn't "break" or run low on charge. Software bugs or internet access issues don't cause paying with cash to fail.
Example of stupidity: I can pay for transit in my city with my phone. However, there are newer payment readers on a small percentage of trains here that just don't like my phone, and insist "Invalid Card". The company that manages support for the readers has been unable to help me. The older readers on older trains work fine. The older readers on all the buses work fine. But I have to carry a physical transit card with me all the time anyway, and -- amusingly enough -- it's more convenient to tap the card than to unlock my phone and hope it works.
You borrow someone's phone? Have people forgotten how to talk and help each other? It is very rare for phones to get stolen or break down, and when they do it is a lot easier to borrow a phone to pay for a Taxi than it is to beg for the money for a Taxi ride, so the situation still seems better than what we had before.
Main thing stopping this would be that most phone OS doesn't seem to support guest logins, but that is an easy technicality to fix as long as there is demand for it which there will be as phones becomes more important.
Do they use it because it's "just fine", or because there's no alternative? How many people have daily problems with it (problems they might not have if cash were an option), but we just don't hear about it.
And even with backups, you still need to buy a new (minimum $100?) device if yours gets lost, stolen, or broken. Should it really cost $100 to replace a payment card? For many of us here, $100 isn't a big deal, but for a lot of people, that amount determines whether or not they eat this week, or manage to pay rent this month.
I can put a $100 bill through the washing machine and it's still perfectly usable. When I can do that with a phone, maybe I'll switch.
I ran a credit card through the washer and dryer last month, and even though it got bent, and the stripe doesn't work anymore, the chip does. And the numbers can be punched into a POS terminal if all else fails.
E-wallets are putting your finances into a single point of failure. Tech people should know better.