NFC is better than QR codes in many many many ways. You don't have to line up the codes with the phones, paying is much faster, and the "1 payer at a time" limitation is actually the 99.9% use case for payments.
QR requires pointing, but NFC requires proximity; I can't imagine a street musician using NFC.
NFC requires special equipment. QRs can be displayed on screens and printed on paper which makes them incredibly more accessible and far-reaching.
NFC is invisible, which looks better IMO that a block of pixels with the occasional ill-fitting logo in the center. But tbh at the end of the day they are doing the same thing, the big difference being one is using some new sensors and electromagnetic frequencies to do the job, while the other is using visible light and a sensor that is installed on every phone in the world and everyone is familiar with already.
I agree that QR codes killer feature is that they are extremely cheap to deploy, which is why they've caught on in china. But they aren't better than NFC, even if cheaper.
Until recently I'd have agreed with you about much faster, I always found QR codes a bit clunky and slow.
However I think the image recognition processes must be improving as the last couple of times I've used them (for TOTP setup) recognition was very fast, < 2 seconds of the camera app. coming on as I was moving the phone into position.
It really depends on the software, I have the obsqr app (based on a native library) on a 600Mhz android phone from 2010 and I get recognition in probably less than 0.5 seconds after pointing it at the code.
Meanwhile the whatsapp web code reader on the same device and same qr code takes more than 6 seconds of careful aligning, and even on modern devices there are still some hilariously bad code readers (having to manually align the corner squares with an overlay)
> You don't have to line up the codes with the phones
A good QR reader does not require much lining up, just pointing the phone in the general direction of the code is sufficient, I'm consistently surprised by how fast some QR readers match codes.
That's significantly less work than having to bring your phone right next to a reader.
Every time my friend and I went to costas, I would check out much faster than him with a basic unionpay debit card while he was using alipay and it took time for the baristas to setup their equipment then to do the scan.
NFC requires special equipment. QRs can be displayed on screens and printed on paper which makes them incredibly more accessible and far-reaching.
NFC is invisible, which looks better IMO that a block of pixels with the occasional ill-fitting logo in the center. But tbh at the end of the day they are doing the same thing, the big difference being one is using some new sensors and electromagnetic frequencies to do the job, while the other is using visible light and a sensor that is installed on every phone in the world and everyone is familiar with already.