Season 9 of Fortnite continues with a new batch of content for the hit battle royale shooter. On top of the ongoing Downtown Drop limited-time mode, Week 3's challenges are now live across PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch, and mobile devices. These are your best bet for snagging all the new Season 9 cosmetics, as each task you complete will net you Battle Stars, which in turn will level your Battle Pass up and unlock rewards.
Week 3's challenges are particularly straightforward, so you shouldn't have too much difficulty completing them. This is fortunate, because there's an added bonus for finishing all seven challenges from a given week: You'll also complete one of Season 9's Utopia challenges, which will reward you with a special loading screen. These typically hide a clue that points you to a free item hidden somewhere around the game's map, such as a Battle Star that will level your Battle Pass up by one full tier.
If you've finished three weeks' worth of missions this season, you'll complete the third Season 9 Utopia challenge and unlock the loading screen pictured below. Per tradition, this screen features a clue leading eagle-eyed players to a free Battle Star. Specifically, the clue is scrawled onto the concrete wall the puppies are standing on; look closely and you can see the sketch of a Battle Star above a stack of cars. You'll need to go to someplace on the map that resembles the drawing in order to find the item.
If the drawing wasn't clear enough, you can find a pile of cars like that in Junk Junction, near the northwestern corner of the island. Glide toward the area at the start of a match and you should be able to easily spot the stack of cars. Make your way to the top and the Battle Star will appear. Collect it, finish the match, and your Battle Pass will be leveled up by one tier. If you need more help finding it, we've marked the Battle Star's location on the map below. You can also watch us lead you to it in the video at the top of this guide.
Unlike Week 2's secret Fortbyte #13, there's a caveat to be aware of before you can collect this Battle Star. The item will only appear if you've complete three full weeks' worth of challenges, which means you won't simply be able to go to the stack of cars in Junk Junction and expect to find it unless you've done all of the necessary work first. If you need help completing any earlier challenges, you can find guides for all the trickier ones in our full Fortnite Season 9 challenges roundup. We'll continue to update that with more tips as the season rolls on.
Epic recently rolled out Fortnite's 9.10 update, which kicked off the aforementioned Downtown Drop LTM, which features its own assortment of challenges to complete and rewards to unlock. Alongside that, Epic introduced the Hang Time bundle, which comes with a pair of Jordan tie-in skins. Other changes the patch made include the addition of Hot Spots--areas on the island where you'll have a chance to find Rare or better loot--and the reintroduction of the Semi-Auto Sniper Rifle, which is once again available in Vending Machines, chests, and as floor loot.
While many Sonic fans – many of whom had taken to rectifying the situation themselves – breathed a sigh of relief at the initial news a redesign was in the works, others questioned the logistics involved in a redesigning the CG star of the movie in such a short space of time. Assuming it wasn’t just a simply alteration to his face, retooling the entire film was going to be an epic undertaking and many worried that VFX artists would be crunching until the movie’s previous November release date.
Well, it seems that those involved are committed to giving those artists the time they need. The director has taken to Twitter and confirmed that the movie will now open on Valentine’s Day 2020:
We’re sure the VFX artists charged with fixing things are happier with the new release date – that is assuming Paramount won’t have them chained to their desks over Christmas. Looking at the image itself, we can see a conspicuously gloved hand and the silhouette on the sign appears very much like the hedgehog’s classic Sonic Team logo. Hopefully this sign is a not-so-subtle hint at the direction of the redesigned character.
The pressure is still on though – the filmmakers can’t afford to get it wrong a second time, so hopefully Sonic fans will be satisfied come February 14th 2020. If you need a reminder of the original trailer, here it is:
Are you happy to hear the movie seems to finally be receiving the care and attention Sonic deserves? Do you have faith that the redesign will fix the problems so many people had with the original? Let us know below.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-25-2019, 01:58 PM - Forum: Windows
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Microsoft, Brilliant team up to offer quantum curriculum
With the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit, getting started with quantum development is easy. Now we’re helping to make it even easier: we’ve partnered with the team of educators at Brilliant.org to teach you about quantum computing in a new way.
Brilliant has more than 8 million students and professionals worldwide learning subjects from algebra to special relativity through guided problem-solving. In partnership with Microsoft’s quantum team, Brilliant has launched an interactive course called “Quantum Computing,” for learning quantum computing and programming in Q#, Microsoft’s new quantum-tuned programming language. The course features Q# programming exercises with Python as the host language (one of our new features!). Brilliant and Microsoft are excited to empower the next generation of quantum computer scientists and engineers and start growing a quantum workforce today.
Starting from scratch
Because quantum computing bridges the fields of information theory, physics, mathematics, and computer science, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Brilliant’s course, integrated with some of Microsoft’s leading quantum development tools, provides self-learners with the tools they need to master quantum computing.
The new quantum computing course starts from scratch and brings students along in a way that suits their schedule and skills. Students can build and simulate simple quantum algorithms on the go or implement advanced quantum algorithms in Q# on the web, without ever downloading a development environment.
From quantum Plinko to teleportation and algorithms
Quantum Computing covers quantum information, quantum operations, and introductory algorithm design in an intuitive way. Quantum Computing, the fundamental concepts of quantum information are built up from first principles, and then by finding and addressing the points where classical intuition falls apart. The course aims to present the deep mysteries of quantum phenomena in an approachable way. For example, the course begins with a ball bouncing down The Price is Right®’s Plinko board and then—with a few added lasers—reveals an example of boson sampling, a simple problem that is likely to be impossible to solve efficiently with a classical computer.
Q# for developing quantum solutions
To teach basic quantum operations, the course features a drag-and-drop simulator that follows the student throughout the course and offloads mathematical heavy lifting so it’s easier to focus on the quantum learnings. Brilliant’s circuit simulator allows self-learners to solve quantum circuit puzzles, peek inside the quantum state at any point along the simulation, and get a feel for the operations that a quantum computer may be able to perform. Such experimentation with full knowledge of a quantum state is a great way to learn the tools of the trade, but to really program a quantum computer, you need to follow quantum rules where observing the quantum state can destroy it. That’s where Microsoft’s Q# programming language comes in. Brilliant incorporates the Q# language into Quantum Computing so that programmers can modify and construct quantum algorithms.
Q# also provides a powerful way to quickly prototype quantum programs in tandem with a classical programming environment. Using Q#’s new Python integration within the Brilliant course, students call Python to implement the classical side of an algorithm and call Q# to run the quantum side—all in a single coding environment in their browser. Q#’s integration with Python provides a glimpse into the future of quantum computing: a classical computer that can leverage quantum hardware for particular problems, in much the same way that we currently use GPUs to speed up the solutions of ray tracing or machine learning problems.
Advanced topics of quantum computing
Even before quantum systems will be sufficient to implement the most well-known algorithms at a useful scale, there may be algorithms that can take advantage of mixed classical and quantum computing. By the end of this course, students will appreciate how a difficult classical problem can be translated into a quantum representation, and experiment with the reality of quantum computation. Quantum Computing also illustrates how quantum hardware may enable large-scale quantum chemistry simulation, by taking learners through the efficient preparation and manipulation of highly-entangled states which are prohibitively costly with classical computers.
To learn more
Access Brilliant’s course here. For a limited time following the release of this blog post, the first two chapters of Quantum Computing, including an interactive introduction to coding in Q# will be available to all registered Brilliant users for free.
To learn more about Q# and the Quantum Development Kit:
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-25-2019, 07:19 AM - Forum: Lounge
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With PS5 On The Way, Sony's Big First-Party Games Still Releasing On PS4
Sony apparently plans to bridge the console generation gap in a somewhat different way with the release of the PS5. It's spoken about the possibility of PS4 and PS5 playing together via backward compatibility once the new system is released, but Sony has no plans to leave the nearly 100 million PS4 owners in the past just yet. Given how much recent attention has been given to PS5 and the fact that Sony won't be at E3, you might wonder what's going with its first-party games slated for PS4. Are games like Death Stranding and The Last of Us II still coming to PS4? Sony has reaffirmed that these exclusives are indeed still headed to the current-gen platform.
"For the next three years or so, PS4 will be the engine of SIE's engagement and probability, as we seek to keep the existing owner base engaged and delighted and attract new owners from different markets and different demographics," SIE CEO and president Jim Ryan said during a Sony Investor Relations Day 2019 presentation (via IGN). "In this we will be massively helped by an outstanding roster of new and exclusive games that have yet to be launched."
Ryan was speaking over a slide at the investor meeting, which featured a graphic (pictured above) with one tile that read "Outstanding roster of exclusive AAA games still to come," followed by thumbnails of three upcoming PS4 games: The Last of Us Part II, Death Stranding, and Ghost of Tsushima.
This doesn't rule out the possibility that these games are also released on PS5, but Ryan and the rest of Sony are not ready to cut off the flow of PS4 games just yet.
We recently saw footage of the PS5's insanely-fast load times, thanks in large part to the system's newly-equipped solid-state drives. Despite some of the impressive power packed into the system, PlayStation 4 lead architect Mark Cerny told Wired writer Peter Rubin that the PS5 will have an "appealing" price point: "I believe that we will be able to release it at an SRP [suggested retail price] that will be appealing to gamers in light of its advanced feature set."
Packit (https://packit.dev/) is a CLI tool that helps you auto-package your upstream projects into the Fedora operating system. But what does it really mean?
As a developer, you might want to add or update your package in Fedora. If you’ve done it in the past, you know it’s no easy task. If you haven’t let me reiterate: it’s no easy task.
And this is exactly where packit can help: with just one configuration file in your upstream repository, packit will automatically package your software into Fedora and update it when you update your source code upstream.
Furthermore, packit can synchronize downstream changes to a SPEC file back into the upstream repository. This could be useful if the SPEC file of your package is changed in Fedora repositories and you would like to synchronize it into your upstream project.
Packit also provides a way to build an SRPM package based on an upstream repository checkout, which can be used for building RPM packages in COPR.
Last but not least, packit provides a status command. This command provides information about upstream and downstream repositories, like pull requests, release and more others.
Packit provides also another two commands: build and create-update.
The command packit build performs a production build of your project in Fedora build system – koji. You can Fedora version you want to build against using an option –dist-git-branch. The command packit create-updates creates a Bodhi update for the specific branch using the option —dist-git-branch.
Installation
You can install packit on Fedora using dnf:
sudo dnf install -y packit
Configuration
For demonstration use case, I have selected the upstream repository of colin (https://github.com/user-cont/colin). Colin is a tool to check generic rules and best-practices for containers, dockerfiles, and container images.
Prerequisite for using packit is that you are in a working directory of a git checkout of your upstream project.
Before running any packit command, you need to do several actions. These actions are mandatory for filing a PR into the upstream or downstream repositories and to have access into the Fedora dist-git repositories.
INFO: Running 'anitya' versioneer Version in upstream registries is '0.3.1'. Version in spec file is '0.3.0'. WARNING Version in spec file is outdated Picking version of the latest release from the upstream registry. Checking out upstream version 0.3.1 Using 'master' dist-git branch Copying /home/vagrant/colin/colin.spec to /tmp/tmptfwr123c/colin.spec. Archive colin-0.3.0.tar.gz found in lookaside cache (skipping upload). INFO: Downloading file from URL https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/...3.0.tar.gz 100%[=============================>] 3.18M eta 00:00:00 Downloaded archive: '/tmp/tmptfwr123c/colin-0.3.0.tar.gz' About to upload to lookaside cache won't be doing kinit, no credentials provided PR created: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/colin...request/14
Once the command finishes, you can see a PR in the Fedora Pagure instance which is based on the latest upstream release. Once you review it, it can be merged.
Sync downstream changes back to the upstream repository
Another use case is to sync downstream changes into the upstream project repository.
upstream active branch master using "master" dist-git branch Copying /tmp/tmplvxqtvbb/colin.spec to /home/vagrant/colin/colin.spec. Creating remote fork-ssh with URL git@github.com:phracek/colin.git. Pushing to remote fork-ssh using branch master-downstream-sync. PR created: https://github.com/user-cont/colin/pull/229
As soon as packit finishes, you can see the latest changes taken from the Fedora dist-git repository in the upstream repository. This can be useful, e.g. when Release Engineering performs mass-rebuilds and they update your SPEC file in the Fedora dist-git repository.
Get the status of your upstream project
If you are a developer, you may want to get all the information about the latest releases, tags, pull requests, etc. from the upstream and the downstream repository. Packit provides the status command for this purpose.
The last packit use case is to generate an SRPM package based on a git checkout of your upstream project. The packit command for SRPM generation is srpm.
$ packit srpm Version in spec file is '0.3.1.37.g00bb80e'. SRPM: /home/phracek/work/colin/colin-0.3.1.37.g00bb80e-1.fc29.src.rpm
Packit as a service
In the summer, the people behind packit would like to introduce packit as a service (https://github.com/packit-service/packit-service). In this case, the packit GitHub application will be installed into the upstream repository and packit will perform all the actions automatically, based on the events it receives from GitHub or fedmsg.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-25-2019, 07:19 AM - Forum: Windows
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All US Azure regions now approved for FedRAMP High impact level
Today, I’m excited to share our ability to provide Azure public services that meet US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High impact level and extend FedRAMP High Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO) to all of our Azure public regions in the United States. In October, we told customers of our plan to expand public cloud services and regions from FedRAMP Moderate to FedRAMP High impact level. FedRAMP High was previously available only to customers using Azure Government. Additionally, we’ve increased the number of services available at High impact level to 90, including powerful services like Azure Policy and Azure Security Center, as we continue to drive to 100 percent FedRAMP compliance for all Azure services per our published listings and roadmap. Azure continues to support more services at FedRAMP High impact levels than any other cloud provider.
Achieving FedRAMP High means that both Azure public and Azure Government data centers and services meet the demanding requirements of FedRAMP High, making it easier for more federal agencies to benefit from the cost savings and rigorous security of the Microsoft Commercial Cloud.
While FedRAMP High in the Azure public cloud will meet the needs of many US government customers, certain agencies with more stringent requirements will continue to rely on Azure Government, which provides additional safeguards such as the heightened screening of personnel. We announced earlier the availability of new FedRAMP High services available for Azure Government.
FedRAMP was established to provide a standardized approach for assessing, monitoring, and authorizing cloud computing products and services to federal agencies, and to accelerate the adoption of secure cloud solutions by federal agencies. The Office of Management and Budget now requires all executive federal agencies to use FedRAMP to validate the security of cloud services. Cloud service providers demonstrate FedRAMP compliance through an Authority to Operate (ATO) or a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the Joint Authorization Board (JAB). FedRAMP authorizations are granted at three impact levels based on NIST guideline slow, medium, and high.
Microsoft is working closely with our stakeholders to simplify our approach to regulatory compliance for federal agencies, so that our government customers can gain access to innovation more rapidly by reducing the time required to take a service from available to certified. Our published FedRAMP services roadmap lists all services currently available in Azure Government to our FedRAMP High boundary, as well as services planned for the current year. We are committed to ensuring that Azure services to government provides the best the cloud has to offer and that all Azure offerings are certified at the highest level of FedRAMP compliance.
New FedRAMP High Azure Government Services include:
Azure DB for MySQL
Azure DB for PostgreSQL
Azure DDoS Protection
Azure File Sync
Azure Lab Services
Azure Migrate
Azure Policy
Azure Security Center
Microsoft Flow
Microsoft PowerApps
We will continue our commitment to provide our customers the broadest compliance in the industry, as Azure now supports 91 compliance offerings, more than any other cloud service provider. For a full listing of our compliance offerings, visit the Microsoft Trust Center.
We’ve managed to cover a lot of bases this week, which always makes me happy: we started things off with a review exclusive, and we finally reviewed Shards of Infinity. We also had a little play around with the Terraforming Mars mobile beta, which is coming along very well.
As a quick FYI there will be no Weekender update next Friday. I’m away on holiday, and while I’ll be leaving you in Ian’s capable hands, I’m not asking him to put together the full shebang, so you’ll have to do without it for a week. Normal service will resume week after.
We were very pleased to be able to go live with our Fort Sumter review before anyone else, so many thanks to Playdek for giving us that opportunity. In case this has flown by you – Fort Sumter is a digital port of a physical boardgame of the same name that try’s to simulate the tension and machinations that lead to the American Civil War.
This two-player strategy game has all of the tension and nuance of something like Twilight Struggle but is playable in only a fraction of the time, and Playdek have done an excellent job. Check out our review for more.
TheoTown (iOS & Android) – Full review coming soon!
We haven’t had a decent city builder to look at it in a while, but TheoTown may just fit the bill. It’s been out on Android for around five years now and has a very dedicated community online, but this new version will be available on both iOS and PC. The new version comes with elevated terrain as a feature, which is something the community has been asking about for a while.
We’ll try and get a full review of this game up ASAP.
It’s not a game, but in a similar vein to the Steam Link release on iOS a couple of weeks ago, we thought we might as well throw this your way as well. Valve have spun-out their ‘nu style’ chat interface (which was designed to combat things like Discord on the PC) into its own app. No voice chat yet, but it’s coming and the app has plenty of other functionality that you’d want from something like this.
Handy if you happen to do a lot of communicating via Steam Chat, as the current Steam Mobile app is rather clunky and difficult to use. It also hasn’t been updated in a couple years now, but Steam have said they’ll be improving its security functions and possible doing something else with it further down the road.
ODD is an excellent card-based dungeon crawler whose only sin was the fact that it was only playable on tablets. Today we’re pleased to report that nearly a year later, the game is now playable on your phones in portrait mode.
Sales
There’s a fair few sales this week that might tickle your fancy:
First up, in celebration of the move to phones, One Deck Dungeon is discounted by nearly 50% on both iOS & Android.
One of our past all-time favourite roguelikes, Sir Questionnaire, is currently going cheap on iOS.
All of the Reigns games are also going cheap on iOS, although only our favourite – Reigns: Game of Thrones, is also discounted on Android.
Google and Binomial Open Source Basis Universal Texture Format
One common problem with game development is compression, it’s a classic trade-off. Do you save disk space at the cost of either performance or VRAM usage or do you favor performance at the cost of size? When it comes to GPU Image Textures, this is exactly the trade-off Binomial is trying to get rid off. Thanks to a recent partnership with Google, their work is now available and open source!
Today, Google and Binomial are excited to announce that we have partnered to open source the Basis Universal texture codec to improve the performance of transmitting images on the web and within desktop and mobile applications, while maintaining GPU efficiency. This release fills an important gap in the graphics compression ecosystem and complements earlier work in Draco geometry compression.
The Basis Universal texture format is 6-8 times smaller than JPEG on the GPU, yet is a similar storage size as JPEG – making it a great alternative to current GPU compression methods that are inefficient and don’t operate cross platform – and provides a more performant alternative to JPEG/PNG. It creates compressed textures that work well in a variety of use cases – games, virtual & augmented reality, maps, photos, small-videos, and more!
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How does it all work? Compress your image using the encoder, choosing the quality settings that make sense for your project (you can also submit multiple images for small videos or optimization purposes, just know they’ll share the same color palette). Insert the transcoder code before rendering, which will turn the intermediary format into the GPU format your computer can read. The image stays compressed throughout this process, even on your GPU! Instead of needing to decode and read the whole image, the GPU will read only the parts it needs. Enjoy the performance benefits!
The project is available now, open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. This new technology should be a great boon to game engines and tools hoping to support texture compression across a number of devices, and I assume will make it’s way into more Google products as time goes on.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-25-2019, 01:05 AM - Forum: Lounge
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New Overwatch Event Makes Your Skin Choice Matter
Overwatch League, the official competitive scene for Blizzard's team shooter, is pitting fans against each other to win the honor of topping the teams. The winning team gets to take over the official OWL Instagram account.
From May 27-31, equip an Overwatch League team hero skin and take part in Quick Play or Competitive matches. Each match you complete earns one point for the team you're representing, and the winning team will be announced on June 3. It all works similar to Splatoon's Splatfests, which tie team colors to surveys.
The announcement notes that you must complete a match for your point to register, including overtime. It's okay if you need to switch to a different hero, as long as you were wearing a team skin at some point during the match. It also doesn't matter if you're wearing the Home or Away skin. You can also contribute points on Twitter by tweeting with the #MyOWLTeam hashtag and tagging your favorite team. Blizzard promises that stage three of the event will begin on June 6, but it didn't specify exactly what that will entail.
This is run concurrently with the middle of the Overwatch Anniversary event, which runs through June 10. As usual that has introduced a bunch of new skins, as well as other cosmetics and rotating brawls. Still, if you're a fan of the Los Angeles Gladiators or the Philadelphia Fusion, you may want to put aside your Honeydew Mei or Gargoyle Winston temporarily and support the team.
Apple Card is the subscription that pays you to use it
Apple Card works just like any other Apple Pay account, but the software experience Apple is creating around it to enhance digital banking represents both a new Services venture and also an additional reason for users to keep buying hardware. That’s why Apple is paying its customers to use it.
Apple Card and the reverse subscription
Compared to the other new Services Apple announced in March — Apple Arcade video games, News+ periodicals and TV+ original content — Apple Card isn’t a subscription. Apple Card is actually the opposite of a subscription: using it pays you back via Daily Cash rebates.
This “free money” comes from the merchants who accept credit cards. Whenever you pay with any card, the merchant accepting your payment pays the card-issuing bank a fee. It’s common for card issuers to offer buyers “cash back,” which returns part of the fee collected to the buyer.
The cash back idea — along with no annual fee — was devised by Sears in the mid 80s when it introduced Discover in an attempt to break into the card business. By offering users cash back, it could attract customers otherwise happy with their existing cards. Additionally, the cash back promotion served as an incentive to spend more.
The idea of using credit to not just finance but incentivize consumer behavior was also explored by Apple. A 1984 Byte advertisement outlined “Apple Card,” a credit card exclusively for buying “Apple Computers, peripherals and software.” Twenty years later, Steve Jobs proposed a vanity credit card that paid out points for use in buying iTunes songs. Today a variety of cards offer some system of rewards in the form of points, airline miles, cash back or other incentives.
A less advanced Apple Card, 35 years ago, also sought to influence buyer behavior.
Apple’s original spin on the idea of cash back is to make rebates immediate and obvious, so you are aware that you are “getting money” every time you use it. But it also has a second component: rather than simply applying your cash back to your account, the Daily Cash credits are loaded onto your separate Apple Pay Cash account. That’s the personal spending account Apple earlier set up with Discover to enable free person-to-person Apple Pay transactions similar to PayPal or Venmo.
Offering its vast installed base of the world’s most affluent buyers a new Apple Card account is therefore a two-pronged strategy to induce Apple Pay transactions: when you make a purchase, a small rebate is applied to Apple Pay Cash, encouraging you to use that money to pay a friend or split a tab using a second Apple Pay transaction.
Apple wants to encourage NFC Apple Pay transactions, but more importantly it wants to make using Apple Pay routine. The company has previously noted that in countries where there’s an NFC transit system driving a critical mass of transactions, Apple Pay is more rapidly adopted as a payment system for other purchases, too.
Apple Card’s “Daily Cash” feature also promotes the use of Apple Pay Cash
Apple Pay and NFC vs the Mag Stripes
Apple Pay has been working to push the world toward more secure NFC transactions, which never expose your account number and protect the near field wireless transaction with an encrypted conversation between the terminal reader and a device’s silicon “secure element.”
However, much of the world — including a lot of the United States — is still stuck in the really old world of 1960s-era magnetic stripe transactions, which requires a physical card with a stretch of old cassette tape stuck on the back that can be read by a magnetic head in a credit card swipe machine.
That status quo at the launch of Apple Pay in 2014 informed Samsung’s plans to acquire LoopPay, a company that had developed a way to fake a magnetic swipe by generating an encoded magnetic field conveying the same data recorded on physical credit cards.
Apple — like Google — focused entirely on NFC, meaning that if you have a card enrolled in Apple Pay and a vendor doesn’t accept NFC payments, you have to pull out your physical card to either swipe it or insert it to use the card’s EMV chip.
Rather than try to retain compatibility with old mag stripe readers, Apple built an NFC-only system for iOS with an archaic card to serve as a legacy shim
Apple wasn’t simply trying to move all transactions to its devices; it was purely interested in promoting NFC as the payment solution. One of the benefits of only supporting NFC is that unlike Samsung, Apple doesn’t have to include and support a second mag stripe reader system on its devices, now and into the future.
Apple is notorious for killing legacy and aggressively dragging its users kicking and screaming into the future. If the world were being lead by Samsung, we would never need to phase out mag stripes, and probably wouldn’t. But by shifting its large, affluent base of users exclusively to NFC payments, Apple can make the future happen sooner, just as it did back in 1998 with USB, and now with USB-C.
Many pundits found it very convincing that Samsung would outperform Apple in mobile payments by offering legacy support for the once-ubiquitous old mag swipe readers. Three years after it adopted LoopPay’s technology on its Samsung Pay enabled phones, however, Samsung’s share of mobile wallet transactions was at 17% compared to 77% for Apple Pay.
In 2014, it looked like LoopPay was going to help Samsung Pay beat Apple Pay.
Certainly part of that disparity is due to Apple’s much larger installed base of premium users. Virtually all modern iPhones in use support Apple Pay; Samsung Pay is limited to the company’s higher-end Galaxy S and Note flagships, a much smaller base of users that’s only about a sixth of all Samsung phone buyers. That’s another example of how Samsung’s impact on the future of tech is far lower than its shipments would suggest.
However, NFC use isn’t simply a matter of technology availability. Google pioneered NFC support for Android long before Apple Pay was introduced, and yet despite broad support for NFC on various Androids, the same report noted that Google Pay adoption was only at 6%.
The real challenge for inducing NFC adoption wasn’t merely rolling out technology. It was changing behavior, both in convincing buyers to use it and in convincing banks and merchants to support it. That’s been the task of Apple VP Jennifer Bailey, the executive in charge of Apple Pay.
It certainly helped Apple that Google had spent years and tons of money trying to promote NFC. However, Bailey’s group has also worked to promote Apple Pay to users. Most recently it has worked to link Apple Pay to common transactions, notably transit fares and the area of “access,” which uses NFC to enable campus, hospitality and enterprise Wallet app ID cards to open doors as well as make payments.
NFC is used at Apple Park to control access. Apple has also issued NFC badges to attendees at its Worldwide Developer Conference, but these aren’t loaded into Wallet because it appears there’s currently no way to install a globally unique, non-transferable pass to a specific device. We will likely hear more about Apple Pay and NFC at WWDC19, which is now just over a week away.
