A new research note from Mercator Advisory Group,
The Obstacles Facing Android to Enable a Payments Infrastructure That Rivals Apple Pay, identifies the hardware, operating system, and business challenges associated with delivering a common payments environment across the highly fractured Android value chain. Android has the largest worldwide market share because Google lets partners adapt and expand Android with hardware and software variations. The primary challenge is to establish a center of gravity that will pull the Android value chain toward a common payment implementation. Multiple payment implementations will limit adoption by payments players to only the devices with the largest volume because of the cost associated with creating individualized fraud controls.
“The Android market is clearly responding to Apple Pay, and rumors are swirling around Google, Softcard, Samsung, and Loop Pay.” said Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation, and author of report. “The payments value chain is as complex as the Android value chain, so finding a best-fit solution that integrates these two value chains should be the goal. This publication identifies the technical and business obstacles that exist within the Android and payments environments and identifies multiple solutions that could be used to advance payments on Android that would avoid multiple proprietary solutions.”
Highlights of the research note include:
- An in-depth analysis of mobile hardware market share and its impact on payments
- A review of the current market share of Android OS versions and its impact on payments
- An in-depth analysis of payment implementations on Android that identifies the technical challenges that leads Mercator Advisory Group to predict that Host Card Emulation (HCE) implementations are years away in the U.S. market and may not arrive at all
- A review of existing Near Field Communication (NFC) implementations and how these relate to fraud controls within the payments infrastructure
- A review of different secure environments for Android, including the payments Secure Element, the Trusted Platform Module, Knox, HCE-cloud implementations, and others.
- A review of biometric implementations on Android
This research note is 12 pages long and contains 3 exhibits.
Members of Mercator Advisory Group’s Emerging Technologies Advisory Service have access to this research note as well as the upcoming research for the year ahead, presentations, analyst access, and other membership benefits.