Twelve Years Later, Apple Pay Finally Has Competition. Here Is Why.

There’s been an unexpected change in the world of online payments that not everyone is aware of. For the first time since the launch of Apple Pay, rival mobile wallets can now operate the instant a phone meets a card reader. The change traces to a courtroom.

Just two years ago, Apple lost an antitrust case and was ordered to open access to its NFC stack, the main hardware layer behind tap-to-pay that had been closed to outside developers for about 12 years. The software required to build on it began reaching developers in 2026, with the earliest U.S. components due in August, opening a window that had been shut since Apple Pay launched.

The Layer That Stayed Shut

Near-field communication is the technology that lets a phone stand in for a card at checkout. For 12 years, only Apple Pay could use it. No outside developer, whatever its funding or intent, could build a wallet that worked natively at the register. The antitrust ruling ended that arrangement.

The hardware layer opened first; the software pieces, built by Visa, Mastercard and a small set of approved partners, are rolling out through 2026. Developers can now build payment steps that happen during a transaction, something the closed system had made impossible.

Josh Steiner, the 24-year-old chief executive and co-founder of San Francisco fintech EmberPay, compares the moment to two earlier Apple decisions that reshaped whole industries. “Apple has released its NFC stack: that’s near-field communication, the thing that allows your phone to be a payment method,” he says. “That variable change has completely shifted the goalposts.”

When Apple opened GPS access to developers, Uber and Lyft followed. When it opened the camera, Instagram and Snapchat followed. Each release created a short window for products previously unheard of and unbuildable.

Despite this importance, Steiner points out, public awareness of this change is remarkably low, buried beneath the volume of AI coverage.” Had this happened 10 years ago, before the big AI wave, this would have been the biggest news in tech,” he says. “Everyone in Silicon Valley and San Francisco would be building toward a new type of mobile wallet.”

Two Releases, Two Rulebooks

This opening didn’t happen the same way everywhere. In the European Union, where the original complaint began, Apple was ordered to make a full release through a cloud-based system called Host Card Emulation, open to any developer and with no fees charged by Apple.

In the U.S. by contrast, where Apple faced no suit, the company released a much narrower version built on the iPhone’s highly-encrypted security vault, the Secure Element, which stays inside Apple’s own infrastructure. Developers must choose from a limited, high-cost set of Apple-approved applets built by Visa, Mastercard, or one other approved party. And unlike in the EU, Apple can still charge fees on any purchase made through an NFC wallet on iOS.

Charlie Baker, the British engineer who serves as EmberPay’s chief technology officer, says the U.S. build is far newer and more involved than Europe’s: “HCE is a tried and tested technology, but the work we’re doing in the US is literally the very first of its kind. There’s a ton of moving parts, paperwork and partnerships we have to get right to make this work, but that’s just how it is at the very bleeding edge of technology, and it’s happening.”

That difference shaped what has been built. Europe’s earlier, freer release produced a handful of wallets competing mostly on rewards. Because payments routed outside Apple Pay avoid its 0.15% fee, they can pass part of the saving back as cashback.

“Most have been based around giving you extra reward points and whatever else,” Steiner says. Those entrants proved appetite for an alternative exists without settling which uses will define the category. The U.S. release is newer, tighter and later, but now open, and its limits don’t rule out the use-case-specific building that is the bigger prize. “In the U.S., the release (or the ability to build) has kind of just started,” he adds.

These changes in Europe are a major sign that the category is growing, and the U.S. is, in turn, the less-explored market with potential for more.

Changing What a User Selects

The deeper opportunity, in Steiner’s view, sits above the card itself. The first wallets took the easier route of better rewards for routing spending outside Apple Pay’s fee, but Steiner argues that’s not the most consequential thing the opening allows. Inside Apple Pay, the choice at checkout has always been which card to use; the release lets builders fix the payment instrument in advance and free that moment for a different decision.

Most early entrants kept the card-selection screen. But EmberPay, which Steiner founded with chief technology officer Charlie Baker and chief operating officer Micah Thomas, fixes the card at the app level so the variable becomes which group to pay with: a group chat.

Opening the app at the register means choosing a conversation instead of a card, and payment flows from there automatically, without the post-transaction steps that define bill-splitting today. “The next variable that you get to choose doesn’t have to be which card,” Steiner says. “It can be something else.”

Splitting through the usual Apple Pay and Venmo combination runs about 30 seconds; EmberPay’s pilot data puts it near three, cutting the social cost of asking to be repaid (which Steiner values at roughly $12) down to about $2, possible only because the NFC layer is now open.

The pattern points to something larger, as a wallet built for one use case can take share from the established apps that currently own it. The significance runs past group payments: the checkout moment can now be rebuilt around any use case.

One of the First, Not the Last

As Steiner points out, EmberPay reached this opportunity nearly by accident. Steiner was already building a group-payments app when a friend in fintech told him Apple’s NFC stack was closed and the idea was impossible. He checked, and found the antitrust ruling had broken two months earlier. “Completely coincidentally,” he said of the timing.

Looking forward, Steiner expects incumbents such as Venmo and Cash App to add point-of-sale splitting as a feature, and is unbothered by the prospect. His case is structural: a product built for one job will always beat the same job buried inside a crowded app.

He points to Instagram and Facebook as an example. Once users had a tool made for photo sharing, Facebook’s version felt worse despite doing nominally the same thing. “Once you get used to the convenience of a tailored solution that is heavily optimized for a specific use-case, anything less will feel horribly messy and laborious,” he says.

The wider implication from Apple’s open access to its NFC stack is one that’s hard to avoid: as more teams build use-case-specific wallets into the opened layer, the general-purpose model Apple Pay established faces a generation of challengers that could not have existed before. EmberPay is one of the first, but it won’t be the last.