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For those hating on the Leap Top Up for iOS. A thread. Note: We did not develop that app, nor had anything to do with it. This is a perspective of someone who develop apps, works in the Irish market, and is a regular leap user
People always wondered why Leap needed to "collect" your payment. this was because Leap is a stored value platform. The value is stored on the card. Why ? Because a bus won& #39;t always have an internet connection, particularly when it was launched.
Why has it taken so long to come to iPhone? Apple& #39;s NFC has been quite restricted from a developer& #39;s perspective, and only changing slightly over the last few versions of iOS. This needs iOS 13, and I& #39;d suspect you could only achieve it since the release of iOS 13
Why can& #39;t I just use my phone as my leap card? That would require changing every leap card reader - so that& #39;s every bus, every turnstile, every Luas terminal. Prohibitively expensive ! (Probably coming in the next generation, along with bus connects)
Why not Apple Pay ? Good question. But remember one of the major banks was _very_ late to the Apple Pay party, so they had to offer non Apple Pay. Each payment pathway would add cost in terms of design/development and QA
Ugh? Why the web view. This you can blame on EU banking law. Secure Customer Authentication which is now mandatory, typically takes you on a web journey (for good security reasons), so if you are manually accepting cards in an app, you are going to need to bring the web into it
(Trust me, we& #39;ve had to _add_ web journeys into existing apps, how do you think we felt?)
What took so long?- Who knows? Leap is a consortium, so maybe needed lots input, the company developing the app may have had a queue of projects, there may have been a delay in getting copy, it may have got stuck in legal why they decided how to answer apple& #39;s new privacy report
What I will say is I& #39;m glad it is here. I used it, tried a top up and it all worked great, and that& #39;s enough to make it a keeper for me. Well done @TFIupdates
