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A Norwegian payment app called Vipps is the first service to take advantage of a new, more open iOS ecosystem thanks to EU regulations. Starting today, Norwegians can use Vipps for tap-to-pay transactions and online payments, and they can even set the app as the default payment option on their iPhones, as reported by MacRumors.
Since its launch a decade ago, Apple Pay has been the only way to use tap to pay on an iPhone. That’s changing with iOS 18.1, which makes tap-to-pay via NFC available to third-party developers for the first time. Apple committed earlier this year to open up the API after EU regulators ruled Apple Pay anti-competitive.
This pressure from the EU has recently forced Apple to open up the famously locked-down iPhone in unprecedented ways, from adding RCS support to letting you delete pretty much any app you want from your phone. But unlocking the NFC chip is a particularly interesting test case since it could usher in a whole bunch of new and helpful ways to use your phone — or create a mess of competing payment and ID storage platforms that don’t cooperate with each other.
Either way, it’s going to be a big deal, and the first step forward into that new era comes from a small financial organization in Scandinavia.
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