Google Pay & Apple Pay are set to get huge upgrades

NFC, the underlying technology for Google Pay, Samsung Pay and Apple Pay (among other mobile payment solutions), is set for a pretty large upgrade. As the NFC Forum, has revealed its roadmap for NFC technology, which will extend into 2028.

Some of the new features coming to NFC include increased power for NFC wireless charging, and increased range. Below, you’ll see the major updates coming to NFC over the next five years.

1. Increased Power for NFC Wireless Charging. The current NFC Wireless Charging specification offers up to 1 watt of power and plans are to increase these capabilities up to 3 watts. This change will bring wireless power and charging to new and smaller form factors, disrupting industrial design while defining new markets.
2. Increased Range. Today, NFC connections are limited to a range of 5mm, but the NFC Forum is in the process of examining ranges that are four to six times the current operating distance. Even a modest increase in range would make contactless transactions and actions faster and easier. It would also improve usability by decreasing the precision needed for antenna alignment.
3. Multiple Purpose Tap. This feature will further improve the contactless user experience by supporting several actions with a single tap. The use cases driving this work include point-to-point receipt delivery, loyalty identification, and total-journey ticketing.
4. Modernizing Device-to-Device Communication. Designed to empower NFC-enabled smartphones to have Point-of-Sale functionality (SoftPOS), allowing businesses or individuals to receive payments anywhere.
5. Expanding NFC’s Ability to Share Data Formats Needed for Sustainability. Enabling NFC to share data on its composition and ways a product can be recycled, helping to meet evolving consumer demands, and regulatory requirements, as well as contributing to a healthy circulatory economy.

It’ll be a while before we see changes

Because this is a roadmap, through 2028, it’s going to be a few years before we really see any changes with NFC. It’ll likely be at least 2025 before we see any big changes on the user-end.

However, the NFC Forum has stated that the work needed for these improvements is already under development, and it could take two to five years before it is launched. It’s also going to require Apple, Google and other smartphone makers to include newer NFC chips into their smartphones to make these new features available. It’s unclear when they will be forced to use new NFC chips, however.