Hey there, I’m looking for an alternative to Google pay that’ll allow me to use NFC payments etc. Thoughts?
I don’t have a Google account, nor am I interested in opening one.
E: Just to clarify, the payment part would be convenient, more annoying is how I don’t get to use a single place for my subway/gym/ticketmaster passes.
Figured as much, just thought I’d ask. What about for other things like gym passes?
It looks like you can read and clone NFC tags with the Flipper Zero, using it as a wallet of sorts for all your cards. But you need the card in the first place to be able to read it.
Still waiting for mine to arrive so I can experiment and confirm.
You can do that as well for some NFC tags on your smartphone. On my iPhone, I can read and write in an app called Ally for Amiibo backups. There are similar apps for the same sort of thing for other NFCs. You can scan them in your phone and then write them to another device.
I have read online that jailbroken and rooted devices have the capability to be the tag as well, so you can use your backup on your smartphone instead of having to write it to a blank tag.
Ah see, this is the kind of seemingly arcane ideation I’m looking for… maybe there’s an analog on Android.
Perhaps it might work? You may have to be rooted on Android for your phone to be the tag to then make purchases. But being rooted and banking apps often don’t play nicely together, so you won’t be able to access your banking app on the phone if that’s something you’ll want to do alongside this.
If you want to go the route of just being able to backup and then copy it to a blank tag, I bought some off Amazon. They have cards the size of a credit card and also little circles too. But these seem to be permanent, like you write once to it and that’s it. There’s also a storage limit on them, so in the case of the Amiibo, I couldn’t scan them to the credit card sized ones because they weren’t large enough to store Amiibo data. You can also buy devices that will be the tag and cycle through like the Flipper Zero does but just for this purpose. Most of these seem to be for people like me doing it for Amiibo so no idea if it would work on this.
Which this now makes me remember something slightly unrelated I saw on Instagram…some people have taken the chip off of their cards and then put them in things like one guy cut the chip off and then submerged it into resin and made a ring which he could then scan at the Google Pay registers. Biggest issue I see with this is (besides the amount of time and work) that the card has an expiration date, so will inevitably useless after some time lol. But a neat idea, nonetheless.
I really like these ideas. I’ll think about something like this while I’m working, maybe do a bit of reading at lunch.
How much data could an amiibo have that a CC wouldn’t?
I’m using an app on my iPhone called NFC Tools right now to do this so I can get you the numbers.
I just scanned one of my Amiibo tags (Legend of Zelda - Link, 8-bit) and it says that it is 540 bytes in size. This was one I copied over to an existing tag. It says it is 135 pages (4 bytes each).
Meanwhile scanning my debit card doesn’t seem to give me a size…
Here are screenshots so you can see what I see:
And I also captured the signal when trying to do Apple Pay from my Apple Watch and this was the result
I’m guessing these are encrypted which is why I don’t get the same data and makes sense now that I think about it. You could do some heavy damage to someone through this method if left open.
There’s an app called Catima that might allow you to store other cards
it can only store cards that use barcodes/QR codes, not NFC ones.
Thanks, I actually use this for my Ikea cards etc. Great for static barcodes etc, doesn’t support NFC though. Thanks anyhow.