On 11 July 2024, the European Commission closed its investigation into Apple’s practices related to access restrictions to the Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology used for contactless payments with mobile devices after accepting Apples’ final commitments. The Commission had preliminarily found that Apple had breached competition laws by restricting access to mobile NFC technology on its devices to its own payment solution, Apple Pay. This prevented other mobile wallet app developers from offering NFC payments. Apple’s final commitments includes extending the possibility to initiate payments with HCE payment apps at other industry-certified terminals, explicitly acknowledging that HCE developers are not prevented from combining the HCE payment function with other NFC functionalities, removing the requirement for developers to have a licence as a Payment Service Provider or a binding agreement to access the NFC input, allowing NFC access for developers to pre-build payment apps for third party mobile wallet providers, updating the HCE architecture to comply with evolving industry standards used by Apple Pay, allowing developers to prompt users to set up their default payment app and redirect users to the default NFC settings page, complying with the same industry standard-specifications as developers of HCE payment apps, shortening deadlines for resolving disputes, and offering additional independence and procedural guarantees for the monitoring trustee.
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