Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Bluetooth has too long range. That's why it was never a good idea for Apple to adopt it for payments either, despite all the cheering for it when BLE came to the iPhone. I'd rather these only work with NFC (you know, like Apple Pay). Although I wouldn't mind the BLE option too for things like opening the garage door. But for anything else where you're at close range anyway, it should be NFC by default.


BLE is a superior radio protocol compared to NFC on almost every axis, with the only exception of battery; having a higher range is a feature, since you can estimate the range with a decent precision.

It's safe to assume that Apple was forced to add NFC for compatibility with the existent contactless POS (especially in Europe, where they've got a widespread adoption already). The same applies for the Secure Element, which is a functional duplicate of the Secure Enclave, but runs Java Card and was probably required by CC networks to reuse existing infrastructure.


Who cares what the range is? You can detect distance of the device before communicating. And do you think the data is not encrypted?

"Wifi has too long of range; don't ever purchase something if you're on wifi!"




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: