[Update: Whoops, I was wrong about that. Matt Birchler, who works in the payments industry, has a great explainer about how this works, and it turns out major banks and credit cards do generate per-merchant “DPAN” numbers for tap-to-pay transactions. I stand by my argument that Apple Wallet is at least as, if not more secure than, any digital payment app provided by a card issuer.]
Yeah, Gruber is one of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for Apple outside of Cupertino itself. It comes from a place of deep and abiding love, but he seems to see Apple kind of the way its internal culture also does — as a plucky upstart who has to fight for its very survival against all the big bad industry leaders (IBM and MS, originally). That viewpoint has become more and more absurd the larger and more dominant that Apple has got, leading us to this point where they want to argue that they should be able to simultaneously be an iron-fisted gatekeeper, and a purveyor of apps that “compete” with less-privileged apps on that same platform.
Gruber has always been an Apple fanboy, but in the past few months it's taken a turn into ragebait territory, and i'm this close to stopping reading it
How many things that most people ( within Apple Fans circle ) commonly believes that are plain wrong was started by him?
Apple invented USB-C and turned it over to USB-IF
The original AirPod was sold at cost.
These are the two I remember well, others including Modem, CPU, Unified Memory, and now Payment. Although arguably Payment doesn't count because he did admit he is wrong.
Basically Gruber and Daniel Eran Dilger from AppleInsider have similar traits, they have made their own conclusion and they derived their explanation backwards.
Gruber also lies about having invented markdown, which was actually invented by Aaron Swartz in 2002 (http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/atx/intro.html). Gruber just wrote a little perl script called Markdown.pl in 2004, but after Swartz's suicide in 2013, he pretended that he had come up with the whole thing, and has been using it to market himself ever since. Truly repugnant behavior.
Ah, now that I'm looking closer at the blog, it looks like a one-man MacRumors to me. Out of 21 blog posts this calendar year, all of them either appear to be Apple related, or they appear to be promoting his podcast, which is also about Apple.
>any digital payment app provided by a card issuer
from this line, it seems like the author here and gruber are kind of arguing beside each other. Birchler says that google and samsung pay work the same way. gruber says bank's own apps don't work this way. they can both be right.
does anybody here know if the payment apps operated by card issuers work this way? (or else, do card issuers actually have payment apps? my bank doesn't)
Many bank-specific wallets also use device account numbers. Storing full credit card numbers and the associated cryptographic keys on a device's application processor (like many wallets on Android do, both Google Pay and others) is a big no-go, and even for secure element based solutions like e.g. Apple Pay it's a big advantage being able to lock the number for a lost/stolen device server side without having to reissue the associated physical card and vice versa.
> do card issuers actually have payment apps? my bank doesn't
They've been somewhat popular regionally, especially in countries where Google took their time with rolling out Google Pay support in, or for regional payment schemes that aren't supported in Google Pay. (They're only possible on Android; iOS hasn't traditionally supported the necessary APIs, until very recently when the EU forced them, and still only offers them there).
I don't think they ever were a big thing in the US.
[Update: Whoops, I was wrong about that. Matt Birchler, who works in the payments industry, has a great explainer about how this works, and it turns out major banks and credit cards do generate per-merchant “DPAN” numbers for tap-to-pay transactions. I stand by my argument that Apple Wallet is at least as, if not more secure than, any digital payment app provided by a card issuer.]
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From the original author (Gruber)