KYC and centralisation means govt will promise your money is there. These are essential for dev country or 3rd world. Even with so much kyc often there are fraud. This has minimised fraud.
If you are looking for RMS style freedom etc then look elsewhere. This is not Iceland or Nordic.
One another overlooked issue is India was the largest printer of currency. Until UPI etc modernisation - lots of torn currency - usually caused arguments/inconveniences among population. Also often shopkeepers or transport agencies did not return proper money change upon payment.
Irrespective of privacy, now it take few seconds to pay. Just works. Even without NFC. No worry about return change.
We've seen basically every country in the world make promises and break them. Right now your money is there, but give it less than 10 years until someone is decided to be a terrorist based on their transaction pattern, and all of their money is taken away.
Agree to your point. But the hawker in street in India wants to get paid or he or she cannot eat next day. And if majority say they will use UPI/online payments - they accept.
Do you live there? Every other shop will avoid paying you change including govt offices. While that should be resolved properly they did this workaround using online? Not perfect.
> We've seen basically every country in the world make promises and break them.
Are you sure? It is sometimes close to 30°C in summer in Fue. BTW, did you forget sealevel rises, dust from Sahara, what is you have many days of > 40km/h winds. all those are climate change.
Well for banks there is competition (and largeest german consumer bank - Deutsche Bank/Postbank offers a non-smartphone based authentication device [0]). Not so much for government run railway.
Many useful features like verified by visa or Google Pay or Apple pay is not available.
If you are that anal then using railway does not need app. You can use a mobile browser or desktop. I have seen people show QR code from their computer too. For D-Ticket one can buy from one of the local transport associations - with Chip Card (I am using that).
What purpose does Apple Pay / Google Pay serve other than paying from your smasrtphone? You can use Credit Card NFC payments if you want tap to pay and enter your pin. That workflow is not much more difficult than using a smartphone. And if you prefer using a smartphone - well, don't complain that you have to use a smartphone to pay.
Isnt the aim to remove dependency on Google/Apple? EU should have forced Google and Apple to allow people to use NFC pay without having Google or Apple accounts.
If you talk about using NFC card. Yes, that is available.
this does not mean anything logical. Billions use android. Some will be affected due to any company or ID etc.
Pretty sure you can visit your local apple store and see many people asking for shattered screen or lost iphone. They did lose their accounts.
Moreover even if you use macbook - if you lose google or apple ID situation is same. (for the majority) appstore is important. See your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111545#48123885 you are happy to give everything to iCloud but don't like Google?
I can also store all my data in hetzner cloud. Use chromebook only as a hardware. If Google account is blocked then use Guest session. No account needed. Your turn?
Shatters screens and lost iphones don’t affect your apple account. Sign in to your new device with your apple id and your stuff is there.
Moreso, there’s no google store to go to for help if your google account gets locked.
Of course you can store data on a thumb drive (or hetzner cloud) and use that without a google id. Good luck with that. And it’s not scaleable for billions of users.
Again, apple provides support, google does not. I don’t want my livelihood dependent on a google id.
I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case.
Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple could justify their walled garden for the few years before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to run a steam engine.
Flash was a dumpster fire on MacOS. Apple probably would have supported it on the iPhone if Adobe had stopped it from crashing apps and made it performant on Apple's primary platform at the time (the Mac).
I remember pulling up crash logs for people showing them that Flash was in every one of the Safari crashes the wanted me to fix. I told them it was out of my hands.
No, they didn't. It was straightforwardly unsafe and broken, the heaps of effort that went into supporting it were largely just to paper over that fact. It's no accident that the other browser vendors went along with dropping support so quickly after Apple did.
The reason given for blocking Flash on iOS at the time was it's too cpu intensive on mobile, which impacts battery life. Not that it was "unsafe and broken".
The main reason other browsers stopped supporting Flash was websites stopped being built with Flash because iOS didn't support it, and a lot of people thought that mattered even though iOS had (and still has) a small market share world-wide.
> He cited the rapid energy consumption, computer crashes, poor performance on mobile devices, abysmal security, lack of touch support, and desire to avoid "a third party layer of software coming between the platform and the developer".
Sure, he's laying out a case for the app store they'd later introduce, but it wasn't simply CPU and battery. There's a reason I cited crash logs as the primary thing I remembered about how it affected me. It gave me an immediate reason to share with people about why I couldn't fix Safari crashes when Flash was involved, which made that aspect of my job easier to explain.
They don't. There's myriad laptops out there that are nothing like Apple's products, not even trying to be like them at all.
You can get PCs in formats Apple has never ventured to make and never will.
And let's not forget that Apple copies everyone else.
Folding phone? How long did it take until Apple "invented" the folding phone market? Oh, that's right, they don't have one (yet, but they are followers after all).
VR Goggles? Also late to that race, and they did a stupid thing with it.
Even the iPhone was really, really late to the game (and no, I don't care about their ~30% worldwide mobile market share).
Apple fanboys love to think that Apple invented all the things and everyone else copied them, but those are fanboy thoughts.
Sorry, Apple simply is not the technology leader you think they are.
If you are looking for RMS style freedom etc then look elsewhere. This is not Iceland or Nordic.
One another overlooked issue is India was the largest printer of currency. Until UPI etc modernisation - lots of torn currency - usually caused arguments/inconveniences among population. Also often shopkeepers or transport agencies did not return proper money change upon payment.
Irrespective of privacy, now it take few seconds to pay. Just works. Even without NFC. No worry about return change.