Samsung Pay Users Best Avoid Rooting Their Phones

First you paid in coins, then you paid in notes, then you swiped your card and put in some numbers, now you don’t even swipe your card to pay with it. So what could be next for paying for everything? With the recent release of Apple Pay, the answer seems to be simple, your mobile phone.

Apple pay uses the same technology as NFC (Near field communication) based cards, this means that you can swipe your phone/card/tag and the card reader will receive the information from it, after just a few seconds of being in contact with each other. This means you can pay very quickly but it has raised some concerns, such as the fact that there is no check on who is using the card. Apple Pay addresses this by asking that when you swipe your phone you simply place your thumb on the fingerprint reader and it checks that you are authorized to use that card.

When money is involved people want to be safe, and during its trail run in South Korea Samsung Pay has given a few users a problem. The people involved all have one thing in common, their phones are rooted, a technique where you modify the operating system the phone uses, this means you can gain access to new features which are blocked by the system normally. Samsung pay doesn’t seem to like this and has been throwing up messaging warning users that they can’t use the app because “the system has been modified”. NFC payment systems, such as Google Wallet, tend not to care about rooting because they never physically handle the information about the payment, they just use tokens to point and share the required information.

Samsung Pay looks to accelerate the pace that Apple Pay has set, with not only the ability to pay in an NFC manner but also featuring another three letter acronym technology, MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission). MST enables you to use your phone to act as if you have swiped your card on a magnetic card reader, such as those found on a lot of payment terminals, this means that you could use Samsung Pay on devices and terminals which don’t support NFC, allowing stores all over to benefit from the latest addition to the payment methods roster.

Thank you Phandroid for the information.

Image courtesy of TheTechy.