



As I tweeted earlier today, the updated Pixel Phone Help hardware pages tell the whole story: if you purchased your Pixel 4, 3a or 3 phone in Japan, a FeliCa chip is located in the same area as the NFC.

This is a little misleading because as FeliCa Dude pointed out in tweets, the Pixel 3 uses the global NFC PN81B ‘all in one chip’ from NXP. There is no separate ‘FeliCa chip’:

All the Pixel 3 devices have an eSE…A teardown of the global edition Pixel 3 XL (G013C) reveals a <NXP> PN81B. FeliCa Dude

Pixel 4 teardowns will certainly reveal a PN81B or similar all in one NFC chip from NXP. Google could have gone global NFC with Pixel 4 and given Android users everywhere access to Google Pay Suica. Unfortunately Google went cheap instead of deep, sticking with the same Pixel 3 policy of only buying FeliCa keys for JP Pixel models.

Why is Google turning off FeliCa on Pixel models outside of Japan? I doubt it is a licensing restriction because the whole point of NXP PN81 is having all the global NFC licensing pieces, NFC A-B-F/EMV/FeliCa/MIFARE, all on one chip, all ready to go. It could have something to do with Google Pay Japan. For Apple Pay Japan, Apple licensed all the necessary technology and built it into their own Apple Pay.

Instead of that approach Google Pay Japan is a kind of candy wrapper around the existing ‘Osaifu Keitai’ software from Docomo and FeliCa Networks, and all of the existing Osaifu Keitai apps from Mobile Suica to iD to QUICPay. That’s why having a ‘Osaifu Keitai’ Android device is a requirement for using Google Pay Japan. Perhaps Google is content in candy wrapping things instead of retooling it all as basic Google Pay functionality and letting Android OEMs benefit from that.

Whatever the reason, the moral of this story is that Google Pay Suica will not be a transit option for inbound Android users during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Unfortunately, the Android equivalent of the global NFC iPhone has yet to appear.

UPDATE

Pixel 4/4a all have the same NFC hardware and Mobile FeliCa software, but non-JP models block Mobile FeliCa apps from running.

Like this: Like Loading...