What is NFC?
NFC (or Near field communication) was invented to allow contactless data transfer between two devices – one usually being a phone.
For it to work, all that’s required are 2 NFC enabled devices; one to transmit and one to receive. For example, a V1CE business card with NFC technology can transmit contact details into a smart phone. Unlike bluetooth, which requires device pairing, all you have to do to make NFC work on a smart phone is tap it against the transmitting NFC tag.
How common is NFC?
NFC is probably far more widely used than you think. If you’ve ever paid for an item using Apple Pay or Samsung Wallet then you’ve used NFC technology.
More recently, The NFC Forum announced a huge rise in NFC certification. In fact, at the end of 2019, there were 2 billion NFC-enabled devices in use, and 9 out of the 10 top selling smartphones in the world having native NFC capabilities. These impressive increases are likely due to NFC being the driving force behind mobile payments.
Towards the end of 2019 Apple made headlines when they announced ‘core NFC’ capabilities across all iPhones with the introduction of iOS 13. In the past Apple haven’t always been fully on board with NFC. The functionality has been there, but has mostly been contained to features such as Apple Pay. Now the capabilities have been fully expanded to match those of Google and Samsung.
Not only that, but Apple showed their commitment to incorporating and utilising NFC technology, by using NFC for attendee credentials and access to WWDC (Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference) rather than paper tickets and barcodes. Having Apple fully on board with NFC will only push the market to develop even further and faster.
