Color me shocked—just shocked—that CurrentC, the ostensible competitor to Apple Pay, has some serious problems. It started with a story on Techcrunch about the "clunky" experience that CurrentC offers:
CurrentC uses QR codes displayed on a cashier’s screen and scanned by the consumer’s phone or vice versa to initiate and verify the transaction.
In comparison, if you haven't tried it out yet, with Apple Pay you hold your phone up to the NFC-equipped card reader and hold your finger to your phone's TouchID sensor. Easy.
Of course, things then got worse:
MCX (Merchant Customer Exchange), the coalition of retailers including Walmart, Best Buy, Gap and others, who are backing a mobile payments solution CurrentC meant to rival newcomer Apple Pay, has been hacked. The data breach involves the theft of email addresses, but the CurrentC mobile application was not affected.
Doh. It's a good thing this breach wasn't more significant than it was, but, still, this isn't exactly a ringing endorsement for the safety of your bank account if you use CurrentC. And, frankly, I think that's most worrisome part: to use CurrentC, you have to link your bank account, not your credit card to their system. Given their track record thus far, I'll be keeping my checking and savings accounts as far away from MCX as possible.
Finally, there was a great post on Facebook's developer blog last week about how they made the iOS news feed (nearly) 50% faster. Spoiler alert: they dumped Core Data. If you're looking to do something similar to what Facebook did, I highly recommend checking out Github's Mantle project. I've been using it for a while, now, and have almost nothing but good things to say about it. The only complaint I have is that understanding how all of the semi-magical runtime introspection stuff works can be a little hairy, but that's quite minor in comparison to relying upon a black-box framework that uses exceptions for control flow.
Best,
Aaron
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