Apple’s iPhone launch event Tuesday was largely devoid of surprises, but the company’s new phones do have several features that could significantly impact the way people shop online and in the physical world. But not quite yet.
The most widely noted feature of the new phone was its fingerprint scanner. For now the utility of the scanner is limited. It can only be used to allow users to bypass the use of a password when they want to unlock their phones or buy things from iTunes. This is kind of neat, and could prove to be a modest benefit for Apple in the corporate market, where users often have to enter long passwords to unlock their phones. For now, though, its most important distinction is that it’s a feature that Samsung phones don’t have (yet).
Apple is probably going to move slowly with any more ambitious use of the scanner. It’s hard to think of a more awkward time to give a technology company such sensitive information, given the rolling revelations of the extent of the National Security Agency’s spying. Sure enough, the Internet lit up with discussion of the security of fingerprint scanners in the hours following Apple’s announcement. Apple made a point of saying that users’ fingerprints will be stored in a secure space within the phones themselves, and never uploaded onto the company’s servers. “Expect this storage area and the connections to it to become the subject of frenzied investigations by hackers of all persuasions,” wrote Sophos, the security company, on its blog Wednesday morning.
But companies writing e-commerce apps are likely hoping that Apple loosens up soon. Maybe the biggest potential use of the scanner would be to reduce the friction on sensitive online transactions, by letting other developers build apps that allow for fingerprint scanning for their own in-app purchases. Doing so could drive more people to shop on their phones. This could be done while keeping the actual fingerprint data on the phone itself, said Benedict Evans, an industry analyst. But Apple is not allowing developers to build the capability into their own apps for now.
Apple has also quietly added a feature to iOS 7 that could be used in physical retail stores. Called iBeacon, it allows a phone to automatically communicate with sensors nearby. This could be used to tell a store, for instance, that someone has entered, enabling coupons or mobile payments. Apple also allows users to share photos or documents through a feature called AirDrop.
So far, grand ideas about mobile payments and coupons have not been backed up by consumer adoption, so there’s reason to be skeptical about the potential of some new features from one phone company to change things. But Apple’s new phone does seem to be banging down another nail in the coffin of near-field communications, a technology that allows phones to exchange information when brought into close proximity. NFC, which has been integrated into many Android phone and stores’ point-of-sale machines, was once heralded as the way to drive mobile payments and other commerce-based functions. NFC backers often cited the inevitability of an iPhone with NFC as a tipping point for the technology’s adoption. But increasingly it seems like Apple may never do so, despite a trickle of patents hinting otherwise.
“Apple has effectively killed NFC by refusing to support it,” said Evans.
