[bsimpson]

Tap to pay felt like it took off in the US as a reaction to the germ hysteria of the pandemic. Swiping a card was arguably more convenient than getting out and unlocking your phone. There wasn't much demand for it here when it was popular in e.g. Singapore.

The amount of time people spend holding (rather than pocketing) their phones is also probably higher than it was in the 2010s, so the cost of digging it out of your purse/pocket is less relevant.

[meta] Having a conversation about credit card and video standards in a thread about managerial layoffs feels apropos to how my brain works about other curious topics. We're basically cosplaying a Wikipedia hole.

[rsynnott]

So in Europe for a long time, tap to pay was normally via _card_, not phone. I don’t think there was a common phone-based EMVish standard before Apple and Google Pay came out (there were a few weird stored value things), but tap-able EMV cards showed up around 2007 (again, there were various local and national proprietary stored value cards before that, but in most cases they never really caught on).

Another factor may be that American card terminals were traditionally quite slow, or at least vendors rarely prioritised speed (I have no idea _why_ this was the case, but it definitely seems to have been the case). Tap to pay really works best if the auth can happen within a second or so.