Android Pay emerges as "new" mobile payments competitor

Image credit: Engadget

Google finally rolled out Android Pay last week as an update to the existing Google Wallet app on Android devices. The service will be joining the ranks with Apple Pay, as well as Samsung Pay which launches later this month on the very same operating system, to gain traction in the mobile payments space. While the new app is functionally the same as Google Wallet (which will now be split into a separate app to deal solely with online payments), it presents payment options to the user in a simpler, more direct way, and will likely be easier for Google to market to consumers who are already familiar with Apple Pay. One nice feature newly introduced in Android Pay is Auto-redeem, which brings up loyalty programs and special offers during some purchases with a limited number of retailers (probably why it has only been soft-launched so far).

Google Wallet was first introduced in 2011 as an Internet payment platform that also did mobile payments, similar to PayPal (Google even poached a PayPal exec to work on Wallet, just as they were about to sign a deal that would make PayPal the backend of the service, provoking a lawsuit from PayPal). In the mobile payment arena, Wallet failed to gain much traction for a number of years, mostly due to Google's near-nonexistent efforts to market the service, though the slow adoption rate among major retailers didn't help its success either.

If you've never used your phone to pay at a counter before, it works quite simply. Most retailers in this day and age have installed near-field communication, or NFC readers, atop their traditional credit card readers that can detect when another device with an NFC chip has been placed an inch or two away. From there, the user's pre-entered credit or bank card information is transferred between the two computers, and the goods have been purchased.

Though Google pioneered mobile payments technology originally, their competitors have severely lapped them in terms of features and technology. Last year, Apple announced their own payment service, which features compatibility with the Apple Watch, something no other player is boasting at the moment. Samsung Pay will work with card readers not outfitted with NFC in addition to ones that are, thanks to Magnetic Secure Transmission, a technology invented by LoopPay which Samsung bought earlier this year. Also in the works for early next year, CurrentC is a mobile payment system being developed by a group of retailers including Best Buy, Target, and Walmart that will link directly to users' bank accounts. This system will cut out credit card companies, eliminating fees that retailers would have to pay, but also fraud prevention checks that credit card companies do.

The adoption rate for mobile payment systems among users has not been amazing. Part of the blame resides on Apple and Google, for only allowing a certain subset of iPhone and Android users with the latest operating systems to use it. Another factor is the still-limited number of retailers currently offering support for mobile payments (not to mention CVS disabling them following the Apple Pay announcement). But there's also the matter of inherent advantage over traditional payment methods. Aside from the occasional coupon notification, or automatically applying one's rewards card to a purchase, there's no clear edge in reaching into a pocket and taking out a phone to pay for something, versus taking out a wallet to do so. Giving users tangible reasons to use mobile payments, besides the fact that it's pretty cool, will be the primary challenge faced by Google and Apple as all the new services offered by these companies begin to take their place in the market.

As Square found its niche in small businesses that didn't want a costly traditional card reader, Google and Apple will have to work on developing a hook to attract users to switch to mobile payments. Using Apple Pay on the Apple Watch has been described as a high point of the device in reviews. Perhaps there's something more that can be done there, as Android Wear, a version of Android designed to be used on smart watches, has yet to incorporate Android Pay support. Holding one's watch over a payment kiosk is a clear advantage over paying with a credit or debit card, as it actively removes a step from the process, unlike paying with a phone. We should see some substantial improvements to the services in the coming months as companies vie to assert their place in their customers' payment habits.

Lots of Bots

Computers, in their many forms, have primarily been made to make mundane tasks simpler to accomplish. From Excel spreadsheets that replaced thousands of accountants to smartphones that have put a large amount of computing power in the palm of your hand, each programmer in the world is working towards the goal of making things easier to accomplish. However, not all of these tasks have the public’s best interests at heart. Robots (or “bots”, as I will refer to them)—the kind that roam around the internet collecting and spewing data for other bots to analyze and collect and spew in a never-ending cycle—have a place in the world because humans made it so. So today, I’m going to tackle the simple Twitter bot.

Twitter “ebooks” bots are a sensation. If you have not heard of an ebooks bot, you should try looking around for them. The term ebooks came about from a Twitter bot called “horse_ebooks” that was made to advertise for a website called horse-ebooks.com, and was unique in the way that it got around Twitter’s spam filter. Randomly, it would select a few words from an internet archive somewhere to generate readable tweets, but which had absolutely no context. This made for some particularly interesting tweets, not limited to the following:

Do this now: Sit down,
— Horse ebooks (@Horse_ebooks) November 5, 2011

Why many people achieve very little despite spending most of their time
— Horse ebooks (@Horse_ebooks) September 22, 2013

As the internet often decrees, a cult following followed this Twitter bot’s every move, constantly coming up with inside jokes, phrases, and mannerisms that were depicted by the random content generated by horse_ebooks. And although all of this seems innocent, I think it is worth it to take a look at what can come out of these kinds of things and check out what else some of these bots can do.

Currently, version 3 of Twitter_ebooks is in production today. It is incredibly easy to take your own Twitter history (or anyone else’s for that matter) and create a bot that spits out randomly generated, grammatically correct tweets. Some of them are hilarious, others are profound, and most are confusing. For instance, a joke inspired someone in Australia to make an ebooks bot characterizing Tony Abbott, prime minister of Australia. And, because the bot uses a lot of terminology associated with Tony Abbott’s official Twitter account, there have been some that confuse this bot with the prime minister himself.

Some use this system as a way to curb abuse, harassment, or other things that can be perpetuated through Twitter. The more public your profile, the more you have to separate the wheat from the chaff when reading through your notifications. The iOS jailbreaking scene (“jailbreak” being the term used when you allow your iPhone to run unsigned code) is dominated by those seeking the next jailbreak on the new firmware released by Apple. At any given time, there are only a select few that have dabbled in iOS kernel work, and whenever their work results in a jailbreak of some kind, they are usually flooded with tweets. Some have used these ebooks bots as a way to mitigate the flood of questions that come from random twitter strangers by having those bots take care of the replying.

But it is easy to see how this could become a way for harassment to perpetuate. If someone is skilled enough, harassment can be programmed into a bot (or series of bots) by a single person operating alone, bullying people who voice differing opinions from the creator. To steal a cliché from Spiderman, “with great power, comes great responsibility”, and that is incredibly true in our generation that has a lot of free time and a *lot* of computing power.

With every new development in technology, I think it is important to take a look at both sides of the coin. While it is easy to view their novelty and laugh, you need to remember that this technology is completely backwards-compatible with the people that mean to do harm. Ensuring that a technology meant for connecting people and sharing experiences stays just that—a connection between people—is a tough job. Let’s not ruin it for ourselves by creating bots that harass. Stick to the funny ones that confuse the general population.