Re: Thoughts on Native Payments

Adam Roach <abr@mozilla.com>, 2016-07-05 16:54 -0500:
> Archived-At: <http://www.w3.org/mid/23cb8d4c-e8f4-0081-b281-939a1a7db90a@mozilla.com>
> 
> Ahead of seeing some of you face-to-face this week, I wanted to send out
> some thoughts about how native payment apps can be incorporated into our
> existing work by leveraging work already underway in the web browser space.
> To be clear, I'm not expecting to discuss this during our formally scheduled
> meetings, but would love informal feedback either via email or after hours.
> 
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eljnrb4pT9ggRi7E_1T_jjv2CDt0i4sIxrrGfWgibvI/edit?usp=sharing
> 
> At this point, I'm not sure this even needs any particular specification, as
> it functionally describes how to use existing technologies to bridge from
> the work we're currently engaging in to native applications. However,
> keeping this approach in mind as we move forward with the payment app spec
> -- to ensure we don't cut off this otherwise straightforward avenue as we
> develop that API -- would probably be quite helpful.

Given that making this usable in browsers on mobile devices is important, and
relying on this approach would require users to install a browser add-on/
extension, it seems like in practice a lot of the utility of this would depend
the browsers that users use allowing them to install add-ons/extensions.

I know Firefox for Android has support for user-installable add-ons, and
there’s no technical limitation that would prevent other browsers from
providing users with the ability to install add-ons/extensions, but
currently Chrome for Android at least doesn’t allow users to do that.

So the lack of extensions support in Chrome for Android would somewhat seem
to limit the utility of a browser-extension approach as far as solving
problems for many users on mobile.

  —Mike



-- 
Michael[tm] Smith https://people.w3.org/mike