Australian Banks Ask Competition Regulator to Allow Collective Boycott of Apple Pay

There are plenty of articles floating around the web this evening that try to explain the state of Apple Pay in Australia in light of the recent media attention the issue has received, but I’m linking to this one by Graham Spencer because, as an Australian, he is one of the more qualified people to talk about it.

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The fact of the matter is that Australia’s contactless payment infrastructure was leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world, and in particular the United States, not long ago. We’ve remained in the lead, on par with Canada, but I fear that lead will be short lived. Since the introduction of Apple Pay in the U.S.A., their contactless payment infrastructure has surged ahead and with the help of offerings such as Square, will probably rival if not exceed that of Australia shortly.

The reason the banks down under aren’t as keen on mobile payment as most feel they should be (with the lone exception of ANZ) is that they spent years getting ahead with their own proprietary technology. This rollout took time and money and they don’t like the thought of Apple and others waltzing in and taking advantage of this infrastructure. This is a poor excuse, and one that if the banks hold on to for too long could result in Australia falling back from our “world leader” status in contactless payment technology. Surely the competitive advantage derived from fantastic contactless infrastructure is nearly at an end, and opening up the infrastructure is the next step forward?

Customers want mobile payment solutions, it’s that simple. It has worked in the States, and hasn’t created competition problems. In fact, Apple Pay has spurred innovation and investment in infrastructure. Who’s really interested in the $2.99 “tap and pay” sticker offered by the Commonwealth Bank? It’s ugly and clunky. Apple/Android Pay make for a far better user experience. Ultimately shouldn’t the banks be striving to deliver this?

If Australian banks had their way they’d have infinitely more control over payment systems than Apple request with Apple Pay. It’s not Apple we should be worried about. As Graham says in his article, Apple aren’t foreign to negotiating Apple Pay deals either. The “fear” the banks are pretending to have of Apple, Google, and Samsung isn’t warranted.

Quite frankly I’m disappointed in the reluctance of my bank to support Apple Pay, and even more disappointed in the excuses they’ve come up with. Two years since launch, it’s about time all of the major Australian banks jump on the Apple Pay bandwagon.

Introducing GST calculator

Today, I ship a small app project I’ve been working on. It’s nothing flashy, nothing too exciting, but it’s mine. It’s called GST calculator, works on iPhone and Apple Watch, and does exactly as the name suggests. Boring, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It does what it’s supposed to, does it well, and looks good while doing it. When I first discovered my own need for an app like this, there were some with similar functionality that hadn’t been updated in years, or didn’t support the iPhone 6 screen etc. so that’s how this project was born. It’s been sitting on the shelf for a few months now, but having finished exams last week and having a bit more time I decided to polish it off and ship it, in order to free myself up for the iOS 10/watchOS 3 updates I’ll be making to Daily Steps over the next few months. (And possibly a new iOS 10 messages app - if I am fortunate enough to have a good idea.)

Available on the App Store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gst-calculator-for-iphone/id1097226539?ls=1&mt=8

All day battery and the need for charging stations

The prominence of charging stations at airports is unquestionably a result of failure on the part of device manufacturers.

As I walk through the airport preparing for the flight back home to Sydney, I can’t help but notice the abundance of AC and USB power stations, which everyone is huddled around in anticipation of the power their devices are about to receive.

This shouldn’t be the case. “All day battery” isn’t good enough, because it doesn’t mean what the name implies. “All day battery” is really “all day battery with severe limitations.” In order to achieve it, a device must be used exactly as the manufacturer intends for only a certain number of hours arbitrarily chosen by the manufacturer to mean “all day battery.”

It isn’t a hassle to charge a device once a day. I agree with that, but manufacturers need to be striving for unconditional “all day battery,” including edge-cases.

All day battery will only be a reality when device batteries can last as long as humans can last without sleep. A device shouldn’t die before its user- even if its user wakes up, boards a 24 hour aeroplane flight to Europe, and is editing video the entire ride.

This will mean that with normal usage, “all day battery” may in fact get the average user through a full 40-hour working week, but the beauty lies in knowing that they have all day battery available to them should they need it.

Sure, this is ambitious and we’re probably a while off this kind of reality, but it’s something that needs to happen before “all day battery” really means something that’s as good as it sounds.

WWDC Day 5

As I write this, WWDC16 has officially come to an end. It’s been one crazy ride, and one that I will never forget. Thanks to everyone who made it so great, from the staff at Apple, to the fellow attendees and scholars. Everyone I’ve met this week has been approachable and great to talk to. The advantage of being in a building with thousands of other geeks with a common interest is that there’s always something to talk about, and fortunately others seemed to agree. I’ve met so many unique and friendly individuals this week, and they helped make this week as incredible as it was.

Today was the sixth day of socialising with fellow scholars, and yet I still met so many that I hadn’t seen up until this point. Continuing with the trend of being as social as possible, I enjoyed an afternoon coffee with a designer at Apple as well as an iOS developer at Twitter - both of whom used to live in Australia and have since moved over to California with their families. It was rather interesting to hear their stories and experiences.

I have to say, the coolest part of the day was meeting and chatting with CGP Grey in person. I’d seen some Tweets during the week about him hanging around the conference, but due to his mysterious nature didn’t expect to run into him. I won’t say much, apart from his voice is as cool in real life as in his videos and podcasts, and most importantly he’s a SUPER awesome dude. Grey couldn’t have been more friendly and was happy to hold a conversation, which I appreciated.

It was sad this afternoon to have to say goodbye to all the great people I’ve spent the week interacting with, but with social media technology (thanks, developers!) it’s easier than ever to keep in touch. It’s been an exciting, action-packed week and I am looking forward to attending WWDC again sometime in the future - at which time I’ll hopefully be able to meet everyone again.

Fun fact of the day: CGP Grey is, in fact, not a robot.

Tomorrow’s agenda: Hopefully sleep in, before packing, taking one last walk around San Francisco, then heading to the airport for a 17-hour journey back to Sydney.

Bye for now!

WWDC Day 4

Fourth day of the conference today and things continued as per usual during the day. I’m spending these last couple of days trying to talk to/meet as many people as possible and that began this morning going down the elevator on my way to the conference. The man in there was also on his way, and we spoke the whole 10 or so minute walk to Moscone West.

In between sessions today, I hung out in the scholars lounge as much as possible talking those those I hadn’t yet met. Even ended up meeting another fellow Aussie and a Kiwi scholar who were great to talk to. Adding to the list, I met up with the creator of the incredibly popular “Heart Watch” app, who is also Australian. We had a good chat about his app and lots of other things. From there, I found myself talking to even more Aussies. This time in a group, and most of them were from Melbourne. It was a bonus to make a contact with the person in charge of Developer Relations in Australia.

The most exciting part of the day was the annual WWDC Bash. Held at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium this year, thousands of developers filled the hall waiting to watch Good Charlotte perform. Now, Good Charlotte are one of my favourite bands so I was very excited however I didn’t expect many others to be. Securing front row seats (or front-row standing room, I should say) was a huge bonus, and resulted in awesome photographs and a few great videos. It was fun to be so close to watch such a great band play live - a definite highlight of the trip so far! Now what I didn’t expect was how crazy the rest of the crowd were. Granted, most of the developers in the room stood around passively watching the show but there were some going a little crazy up near the front. Both Joel and Benji from the band made plenty of cheesy developer-target jokes that were very entertaining and got the crowd warmed up. My favourite would have to be Benji’s one-liner: “The guys at the Genius Bar are just wannabes compared to you.”

Fun fact of the day: It’s crazy, but the hardest I’ve ever “moshed” is now officially with a bunch of developers. Totally unexpected, right?

Tomorrow’s agenda: It’s the last day of WWDC. Haven’t quite planned the sessions and labs I’ll be going to yet, but I aim to spend a full day at Moscone West (from 9am-6pm), making the most of every second.

WWDC Day 3

Another great day in San Francisco! Today was a fairly early one, waking up to book in for a consultation at the conference. Following that, I took a trip to Blue Bottle Coffee for breakfast (my first visit so far this trip) a much loved coffee place by Australians. Short review: Meh, tasted like Gloria Jeans coffee so nothing special.

Following that I headed to Moscone West where I met up with some fellow scholars and spent time playing around with the new iOS 10 and watchOS 3 API’s. I then had a consultation with the App Store team which ended up down the rabbit hole of business model and monetisation strategies. Following this, I attended the session titled ‘Quick Interaction Techniques for watchOS.’ It was fairly interesting.

The best part of the day for me was attending a WatchKit lab where I took in some code I’d been struggling with and had a few Apple engineers take a look and help. I truly expected these labs to be a little daunting, but turns out the engineers are great and are always willing to help. Nothing was too much trouble, and no question was too small either.

The day at WWDC ended with three more sessions:
- Designing Great Apple Watch Experiences (best session of the day)
- Focus Interaction on tvOS (incredibly boring)
- Introducing SiriKit (interesting technology, however not relevant to any apps I ship at the moment due to Apple’s limitations on the type of app that can integrate with Siri)

Dinner took place in Little Italy after a nice walk through the streets of San Francisco, and was followed by a cable car ride back to the room.

Fun fact of the day: I spoke to an Apple engineer in a lab today who told me he gets a little starstruck when he is approached by a developer who he knows and respects, and/or whose apps he uses. Glad I’m not the only one who thinks of great app developers as pseudo-celebrities.

Tomorrow’s agenda: Well I haven’t planned my day properly yet, but I imagine it’ll involve coffee at Blue Bottle (again!), then a handful of labs and sessions at the conference. The highlight will undoubtedly be the WWDC Bash - which is a concert put on for WWDC attendees by Apple each year. Great news for me, Good Charlotte are playing this year! I couldn’t possibly have asked for a better band to play and it’s going to be awesome.

What Did Developers Think Of This Year's WWDC?

Zachary Simone from Western Sydney was one of eight Australians to win a scholarship to WWDC. He’s spent the last few days making as many contacts as possible.

“I’m most excited about iOS 10 opening parts of iOS up to developers. So things such as expanded 3D Touch, Maps, Siri and Messages. Messages being opened up is exciting because everyone likes to communicate in a different way and there are now opportunities for developers to create unique ways of sharing things.”

It was cool to speak to Peter Wells briefly about my thoughts on Apple’s WWDC announcements this year. 

WWDC Day 2

First day of “sessions.” There isn’t too much to say about today. I mean, it was super awesome and I had an awesome time, but there isn’t much that anyone who isn’t me would find interesting.

I decided to have a fairly easy day today, fresh off of a long day of lining up for Keynotes. Fortunately the alarm didn’t go off until 7:45, but I’m pretty sure I snoozed until just after 8. This left me in a rush to get ready, but the extra sleep was definitely worth it! After having looked through the list of todays sessions and labs last night on the WWDC app, enough sessions (six, in fact) interested me enough to ensure I didn’t book any labs or consultations today, and instead stuck to the session talks. It was worth it, as most were super interesting.

For the record, I attended:
- What’s New in Swift
- Introducing Apple File System (*ding*)
- iMessage Apps and Stickers, Part 1 (bring on Part 2!)
- What’s New in tvOS (fairly boring, unfortunately)
- How iOS Security Really Works (This was absolutely fantastic)
- What’s New in watchOS 3 (can’t wait to start working with it)

The whole conference vibe fascinated me today. It was absolutely amazing to walk around and see hundreds, if not thousands, of other developers coding away on their MacBook Pro, which is something I’m not used to seeing others do. The sheer number of people inside of Moscone was exciting. And just so you know, I’m that young guy in sessions taking notes with pen and paper.

Dinner was in a nice location tonight, as I went down to Pier 39 with mum to an Italian style restaurant. Had I been 21 or older, I would’ve been at The Talk Show Live with John Gruber and special guests Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi which sounds amazing! Gruber always nails it with guests for the WWDC episode of that show, and it sounds as though tonights show was no exception. I’m looking forward to listening once it’s been edited and released.

Fun fact of the day: I found this out in one of the sessions - pre-Touch ID on the iPhone only 49% of users locked their device with a passcode. Since the introduction of Touch ID, that figure has risen to nearly 90%.

Tomorrow’s agenda: Up early to book some lab time in, there’s a couple I’ve got my eye on. On the way to Moscone I will stop at Bluebottle Cafe - a place I haven’t tried so far this week. It seems as though other Aussies like the coffee there, so I’ll have to give it a go. The plan for the afternoon is to attend a few sessions, followed by a Dub Dub “party” in the form of a panel discussion. Unfortunately most of the after-hours events require you to be 21, so I had better attend what I can.

WWDC Day 1

Hello, Keynote day.
Hello, long day.
Hello, crazy day.
Hello, fun day.

Today, as you might’ve guessed, was Keynote day! Running on only a few hours of sleep, the alarm went off shortly before 2am to lineup for the Keynote. Although getting up so early wasn’t completely necessary, it did add to the experience. There’s something about lining up in the cold at 2:30am for something you’re excited about that can turn introverts into semi-decent conversation holders. It was around 5:30 when the crowd really started to roll in, building steadily until about 8:30am when a few lucky student scholars were taken into the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium early and place in “special seats” which happened to be to the side of the stage. Unfortunately I was not part of this group, however when we did finally enter the venue and find seats I found myself three rows from the front of the public section. Not bad at all. (The entire first section was reserved for members of the press.)

What an experience the Keynote was. I mean, it was incredible! The atmosphere in the keynote hall from the very beginning was electric, and an amazing show it turned out to be. The changes introduced across the board to watchOS, tvOS, macOS (!!!), and iOS are profound enhancements that excite me unlike any software updates from Apple over the last couple of years. While this post is more about my experience at the conference and not about my thoughts on the announcements, I will just say that I am hugely impressed by watchOS 3.0 and am hugely excited to get serious about developing for the platform. It’s so incredibly cool to be able to say I’ve witnessed an Apple Keynote in person.

Following the Keynote, I hung around in the hall for a little longer and ended up meeting, talking to, and even getting a few selfies with, Craig Federighi, Kevin Lynch, Eddie Cue, and Chris Lattner. How cool, right? This was definitely a highlight of the day - meeting and talking to people I respect so much. On that note, just before lunch I ran into a few media personnel I’ve been following for years and it was also a great moment to introduce myself and tell them how much I admire their work (even though they’ve undoubtedly forgotten me by now - only 9 hours later.) The likes of Federico Viticci, Rene Ritchie, and Serenity Caldwell were very friendly and more than happy to give me a few seconds of their time - which I appreciated.

One thing I was fascinated by walking out of the WWDC keynote was to see the press get straight to their coverage - primarily video coverage. Seeing people such as Christina Warren and Walt Mossberg rush around getting videos posted on their respective sites was fascinating to witness. I don’t know if that’s something which *should* fascinate me, but it does.

The afternoon brought with it more lining up, this time for the second presentation of the day - the Platforms State of the Union keynote address. This is essentially a second version of the morning keynote which heavily targets developers and not the general public. It was definitely interesting to learn about the underlying technologies introduced in the new software such as watchOS 3.0 and iOS 10, however I must admit I was beginning to fall asleep by about halfway through this presentation. That’s not a criticism of the presentation, it was rather interesting, but more a comment on how tired I was. Somehow I made it through even further until the end of the Apple Design Awards at which point it was time to call it a day. The tour of Twitter HQ that was meant to be this evening ended up being cancelled for some reason or other, but I was probably too tired to attend anyway.

Fun fact of the day: Somehow I managed to get the first beta of iOS 10 to download onto my iPod touch via the incredibly congested Wi-Fi at the conference.

It was certainly an action packed day filled with exciting news, announcements, experiences, and opportunities. Hopefully today was just the start of what will a great week at WWDC. Bring on tomorrows sessions and labs!

WWDC Day 0

To me, today was the first day of WWDC. Although the conference doesn’t technically begin until tomorrow, today involved check-in, orientation, and a visit from Tim Cook, so it was about as real as any other day will be for the rest of the week.

The day began at a local cafe, Cafe de la Presse,where fellow scholars were met for breakfast. From here began the walk down to the Mission Bay Conference Centre for the WWDC Scholars Orientation. This was an insightful experience which involved being spoken to by Apple engineers who shared insights into what makes a successful app, how to get the most out of the conference week and much more. From here we were led outside for a group photo when Tim Cook appeared, which put most scholars into a frenzy. The proceeding half hour was filled with hundreds of selfies and signatures from Tim. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get a selfie with him, however I did get fairly close (photo at the bottom of this post.)

The rest of the afternoon was spent socialising with other scholars and Apple staff, including engineers who were very happy to talk to us about almost anything. Onto surprise number two for the day… Apple gave out developer Apple TV kits to all scholars. I figure this was just left over stock, but still a nice touch to the day.

Fun fact of the day: It’s been roughly 60 hours since touching down in San Francisco, and I’ve spotted 4 Tesla Model S cars so far.

Tomorrow’s agenda: Well, it’s Keynote day! This will by far be the most busy, crazy, awesome, tiring, and exciting day of the trip. It’s 8:28pm as I type this, and it’s time to start thinking about some sleep. Only a little over 5 hours until I’ll be waking up to join what will be a growing line in front of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, inside of which the Keynote, Platforms State of the Union, and the Apple Design Awards will be watched. Then, assuming I can still keep my eyes open at this point, the plan is to quickly tour the Twitter headquarters before calling it a night. Subject to change, and will tell you more tomorrow. Bye for now!