PinePhone's Ingenious Workaround for Contactless Payments

Description

The image displays a screenshot of a Reddit post about the PinePhone. The main photo shows a black smartphone, identifiable by the Pine64 gear logo, lying on a wooden surface. A physical black VISA credit card from 'monobank / Universal Bank' is strapped to the back of the phone with two crisscrossing pink rubber bands. Below the photo is the Reddit post title: 'Contactless payments on PinePhone (working Google Pay/Apple Pay alternative)'. The humor is deeply sarcastic, presenting an absurdly low-tech, physical workaround as a sophisticated technological solution. PinePhones are Linux-based, open-source smartphones that typically lack the proprietary hardware and software support for established NFC payment systems like Google Pay or Apple Pay. The joke is that by physically attaching the card to the phone, one can tap the entire bundle on a reader, thus achieving a 'contactless payment' with the phone, which is a clever jab at the practical limitations that often accompany open-source hardware enthusiasm

Common Tags

Fintech Hardware HardwareHacks DeveloperHumor TechMeme MobileDevelopment Workarounds

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick That's not a workaround, it's a hardware abstraction layer. The rubber bands are the API

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

That's not a workaround, it's a hardware abstraction layer. The rubber bands are the API
Anonymous

We couldn’t stomach the Google Pay SDK bloat, so we just bind-mounted a Visa to /dev/antenna with a rubber band - zero dependencies, 100 % FOSS, and the PCI auditor rage-quit
Anonymous

When your Linux phone's NFC driver is still in development but your coffee shop only takes contactless payments - sometimes the most elegant solution is two rubber bands and accepting that 'it works on my machine' has evolved into 'it works ON my machine.'
Anonymous

When your open-source mobile platform doesn't support proprietary payment APIs, you pivot to a more 'direct integration' approach. This is what we call 'hardware-accelerated payments' - zero latency, no SDK dependencies, and 100% backwards compatible with every POS terminal. The rubber band provides elastic scalability, and the implementation is so lightweight it literally adds zero bytes to your binary. Sure, Apple Pay uses Secure Element and tokenization, but this solution offers something they can't: the ability to remove your payment method and use it at an ATM. Sometimes the best API is no API at all
Anonymous

Contactless on PinePhone via RBAC - Rubber Band Assisted Contactless; zero drivers, vendor-neutral, and PCI loves that the OS never touches the card
Anonymous

Wallet parity on PinePhone achieved by relocating the EMV token to the chassis - zero SDKs, no vendor lock‑in, and the only incident runbook is “replace rubber band.”
Anonymous

HCE too locked-down? PinePhone devs deploy PCE: Physical Card Emulation via rubber bands
@Deymos_s 1y

PinePhone is cool thing.
@Turok1234 1y

Monobank mentioned 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅 WTF is a bank branch 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅
扇子 1y

i would imagine a privacy-conscious pinephone user would only use cash
@vladyslav_google 1y

MONOBANK MENTIONED📢📢📢🦅🦅🦅🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦
@ephemeralin 1y

Not funny ahaha 😅
@slyveek 1y

MONOBANK MENTIONED 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🔥🔥🔥🔥🤑🤑🤑💲💲💲💵💰💰💰💰🏛️🏛️🏛️
@the_doom_guy 1y

THE BEST BANK MENTIONED 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦
@lilfluffyears 1y

I just put it in my case