Apple is ready to open up the iPhone’s tap-to-pay feature to rivals in the EU after it faced criticism for keeping users within its own ecosystem, the European Commission and the company said on Friday.

The commission, the European Union’s market regulator, said it was considering Apple’s offer after Brussels determined that the Cupertino-based company had a dominant position, outpacing rivals, in transactions made through iOS mobile wallets.

Such transactions rely on a technology called Near Field Communication (NFC), which allows users to tap a smartphone to a merchant’s payment terminal rather than a microchip credit card.

“We are committed to providing third-party developers in the European Economic Area (EEA) with the option to allow their users to make contactless payments using NFC in their iOS apps, separate from Apple Pay and Apple Wallet,” an Apple spokesperson told AFP. .

This option will be available in the 27 EU countries, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, the associated countries that together form the EEA.

“Apple Pay will continue to be a widely available option, with over 3,000 banks across the EEA continuing to offer a great user experience as well as the unrivaled privacy and security of Apple Pay,” the spokesperson said.

The European Commission has invited contactless payment companies to comment on Apple’s proposal for a month to see whether it addresses competition concerns over access to tap-to-pay technology in iPhones and Apple watches.

Europe only

Apple is proposing to make NFC free on iOS devices and will create interfaces for rivals to securely store personal payment data for use in their own apps, the commission said.

Only users with an Apple ID registered in the EEA will be able to use these third-party apps, but “Apple will not prevent the use of these apps for payments in stores outside the EEA,” the Commission said in a statement.

This raised the question of how consumers and regulators in non-EU markets such as the US, UK and Australia might react to the change and whether they could insist on similar treatment.

The Commission noted that so far in Europe, “Apple’s iPhones have only run on Apple’s operating system (iOS), creating a ‘closed ecosystem’ with this system.”

In May 2022, the EU executive accused Apple of anti-competitive behavior by denying other companies NFC access on their phones. This was the result of an investigation launched two years ago following complaints from EU banks.

Brussels has forced Apple to make changes to its products by legislating that all smartphones in the EU have USB-C ports. Last year, Apple abandoned the slower Lightning port on new iPhone models, but this change took place not only in the European market but all over the world.

From March this year, Apple and five other tech giants – Google-owned Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok-owned ByteDance – will have to comply with the EU’s new digital markets law, which faces anti-competitive scrutiny and tougher obligations .