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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't always have an internet connection, particularly when it was launched.
Why has it taken so long to come to iPhone? Apple's NFC has been quite restricted from a developer's perspective, and only changing slightly over the last few versions of iOS. This needs iOS 13, and I'd suspect you could only achieve it since the release of iOS 13
Why can't I just use my phone as my leap card? That would require changing every leap card reader - so that'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'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's new privacy report
What I will say is I'm glad it is here. I used it, tried a top up and it all worked great, and that's enough to make it a keeper for me. Well done @TFIupdates
