Apple began granting third-party developers direct access to the iPhone NFC controller and secure element in Japan and South Korea on Monday, following orders from the Japan Fair Trade Commission and the Korea Fair Trade Commission that both landed in the first quarter. MUFG, Rakuten Card, and Kakao Pay shipped the first apps that can initiate a contactless payment without routing through Apple Pay. Users can now set a non-Apple app as the default payment app and double-click the side button to bring it up, the same gesture that has launched Apple Pay since 2014. Apple charges an entitlement fee that neither side will discuss publicly.
How the access works technically
The mechanism is the same SecureElementPass and CardSession API family Apple built for the European Union, extended to two more jurisdictions. A developer with the host card emulation entitlement can provision credentials into a secure element applet, and the operating system routes an NFC field detection event to whichever app the user set as default. Apple keeps control of the radio and the trusted execution boundary, so third parties never touch the antenna directly and cannot read another app's applet.
Provisioning is where the friction lives. Every applet must be signed by Apple after a review that the company says takes four to six weeks, and the developer must hold an appropriate payment license in the target market. Kakao Pay's engineering blog described the review as thorough and slow, with two rejections over key rotation policy before approval. That gate is exactly what regulators will scrutinize, because a nominally open API guarded by a discretionary approval process reproduces the original problem in a less visible form.
Why Japan and Korea moved
Japan's case turned on FeliCa. The country's contactless infrastructure, Suica for transit and iD and QUICPay for retail, predates Apple Pay by a decade, and Japanese banks argued that Apple's exclusive control let it charge a toll on a rail the banks had built. The JFTC agreed in a January decision that ordered access within 180 days. Apple did not appeal, which surprised observers who expected the multi-year fight it waged in Brussels.
Korea's route was different. The KFTC acted under the amended Telecommunications Business Act, the same law that forced alternative in-app payments in 2021, and its order came bundled with a requirement that Apple publish objective criteria for entitlement approval. That publication requirement is the more interesting precedent. Apple posted a criteria document last week running to eleven pages, and Korean regulators have already asked for clarification on two clauses that give Apple discretion over security architecture review.
The story is rarely the launch. It is what breaks, what ships, and who owns the mess at 2 a.m.
What users actually see
In practice the change is nearly invisible, which is the point. Setting Kakao Pay as default in Settings and double-clicking the side button brings up Kakao's own card interface instead of Apple's. Face ID still authorizes the transaction, because Apple retained biometric control. Payment latency measured on a Seoul convenience store terminal was indistinguishable from Apple Pay, around 400 milliseconds from tap to confirmation, which suggests the abstraction layer costs nothing meaningful.
The user experience gap shows up in edge cases. Apple Pay handles a failed transaction with a clear retry prompt. Kakao's first release showed a generic error and required backing out to the app. Transit is worse: Suica through Rakuten's app currently cannot be used with an empty battery, a feature Apple Pay has supported for years through a reserved power mode that third parties do not get. Apple says power reserve access is under evaluation, which is another way of saying not yet.
The money question nobody will answer
Apple charges a fee for the NFC entitlement in the European Union, reportedly a fraction of a percent per transaction, and the company has confirmed a fee exists in Japan and Korea without naming a number. Two bank executives told us the rate is lower than the roughly 0.15 percent Apple has historically taken from Japanese issuers through Apple Pay, but not zero. That structure means banks pay for the privilege of not using Apple's wallet, which several of them find galling and all of them accepted.
The economics only work at scale. A regional bank processing modest volume will find building and maintaining its own applet, passing Apple's review, and running the fraud infrastructure more expensive than simply issuing through Apple Pay. Industry consultants in Tokyo expect fewer than a dozen Japanese issuers to build their own by 2027, with the rest continuing as before. That outcome would let Apple argue the market chose its wallet freely, which is a stronger legal position than the one it had in January.
Where this spreads next
India is the obvious next front. The Competition Commission of India has an open investigation into Apple's payment practices, and the National Payments Corporation of India has lobbied for direct UPI access to the secure element for three years. Australia's Treasury has draft legislation that would designate digital wallets as payment systems, giving the Reserve Bank authority Apple has resisted. Brazil's central bank issued a consultation in May.
The pattern across all of them is that Apple concedes when a regulator sets a deadline and litigates when one does not. That is rational corporate behavior and it makes the outcome predictable. By the end of 2027, third-party NFC access will likely exist in most large markets outside the United States, where no equivalent authority exists and where the Department of Justice antitrust case has years left to run before it reaches any remedy phase.
Skarvonix will keep following this beat with reporting grounded in how systems behave outside the launch keynote.
- Privacy
