Hello fellow lemmings! According to this reddit discussion in 2018 there wasn’t any foss alternatives to google pay. How’s the situation in 2023?
Top comment made me smile
You are unlikely to find FOSS alternative that is not for cryptocurrencies as the regulations around credit card data processing makes it hard.
What kind of regulations?
I don’t know the specifcs, but there are strict rules and requirements on how the data has to be stored if you process any of it, then there is complience issues with laws like GDPR and you have to be a registered entity as far as I know. It’s just too much legal paperwork for most FOSS projects.
there are strict rules and requirements on how the data has to be stored if you process any of it
isn’t the data stored locally?
I’m actually not sure how NFC handles the trasmission. Theoretically it can access internet and other communication protocols like bluetooth.
There’s F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/
That’s pretty much exactly what you’re looking for. :)
Edit: Never mind me. I read Google Play, not Google Pay. :P
:P
Check out monero or liberapay.com
Monero is a currency right? And liberapay a way to get online transations. I’m looking for an alternative for google pay, so that I can register my credit card and pay with the phone NFC
Any big competitor to google pay has no reason to upload their platform as open source for their competitors to reuse.
That is because it’s expensive to make and market Apple pay, or other payment processors (and it’s regulated also) so the projects that make it all have VC funding.
In the end they could open source the code but there is not much incentive for that anyway
Why is this so expensive?
Pretty sure there’s hefty licensing fees to pay to use NFC payments, which is to say it’ll never be open source.
Your bank card underneath a protective phone case will do the trick my friend, noone will ever know the difference. I go old school myself and just keep my card in a wallet.
On a serious note, i just used my banks own nfc app, which got a bit glitchy so i stopped using it after i couldnt pay to get on a bus with it. They are discontinuing the service now anyway so c’est la vie i guess. Its not foss, but if your bank has an app that has the feature, then why not, they know everywhere where youre spending your money anyway right?
Sadly my bank only support “link your card with Samsung pay”, otherwise yes you’re right, it wouldn’t make any difference
Is google pay similar to PayPal?
For micro-transactions I stumbled over the GNU Taler project a while ago.
Last time I checked it was not production ready, but maybe it is worth a look?
Sorry, I misexplained in my post. I am talking of a way to register the credit card on the phone, so that I can pay using NFC instead of the physical card
Thanks for clarifying. Unfortunately I do not know a FOSS alternative for this purpose.
Never going to happen. Those are proprietary protocols (which may theoretically be reverse engineered) with cryptography which can not be “abused” (except for catastrophic leaks, which if they happened would certainly be revoked swiftly)
