Apple Patent Gives Peek Into Apple Pay Tech

An Apple patent application made public this week may hold some clues as to how Apple Pay will work in the future, not just with the iPhone and iPad, but also with the Apple Watch and other wearables.

The application, which Apple filed on Aug. 29, 2013, was published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday (March 5), according to Patently Apple.

While the description of what Apple has invented is even more obscure than usual with a patent application, it covers ways of using information from an Apple device’s motion detectors (such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, or even GPS sensors) along with data from “pass applications” (such as a movie or airplane ticket in Passbook or a payment token from Apple Pay) and other applications (such as a calendar app).

One possible use: A calendar app that knows a user is supposed to be headed out to a restaurant at 7 p.m. might check data from the GPS system. If the device hasn’t traveled anywhere in several minutes and appears to be nowhere near the restaurant, the app might remind the user of the restaurant reservation.

A more payment-specific use could be related to the fact that Apple instructs users to hold the iPhone (or, soon, Apple Watch) over a contactless payment terminal for an Apple Pay transaction. Even with the use of tokenization, it’s good security practice to limit the conditions under which the iPhone or Watch’s NFC chip is sending out payment information. If the device doesn’t start using NFC until it stops moving — and only then detects what the patent application calls the device’s “movement state” as not in motion — that would reduce the security exposure for a transaction.

In the words of the application, “movement mode data may control [a] managed element in any suitable way, such as by enhancing, enabling, disabling, restricting, and/or limiting one or more certain functionalities associated with an application or component of [the] device” — which could include turning an NFC chip on or off, or boosting transmission power only while a payment is being made, then cutting it back sharply as soon as the phone or watch begins to move.

That might also be Apple’s plan for improving the somewhat unwieldy need to hover the face of an Apple Watch over a payment terminal with one hand and then press the “digital crown” (the stem on a traditional watch) to trigger the payment.

If Apple has actually worked the bugs out of using motion to trigger an Apple Watch payment, that could be one of the features the company unveils at what’s expected to be its biggest demonstration yet of the device next week.