Osaifu-Link

» see felicanetworks.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Japan did contactless payment early and did it with its own standard. FeliCa, a Sony invention, is what the gates on the Tokyo subway read and what the till at the convenience store reads, and from 2004 it lived inside Japanese handsets under the name Osaifu-Keitai. The rest of the world went a different way, and so did Apple. For years an iPhone bought in Tokyo could not pay for anything in Tokyo.

Osaifu-Link, released on 30 October 2014 by FeliCa Networks, was the way around that. If the phone would not hold the chip, you carried the chip separately and let the phone talk to it. docomo sold a case called the Osaifu-Keitai Jacket 01 with FeliCa built into the back of it. Sony put the same capability into the clasp of its wena wrist watches, where the strap was the computer and the watch head was just a watch. The app issued the electronic money onto whichever of those you owned, topped it up and kept track of it.

FeliCa Networks had been set up for exactly this kind of plumbing. Sony and NTT docomo announced the joint venture in October 2003, Sony holding sixty percent and docomo forty, and incorporated it on 7 January 2004, with JR East buying in afterward. Its business was the chip layer underneath everybody else's wallet, which meant it was also the company left holding the problem when a phone turned up that the chip was not in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the missing chip ~

The gap closed in September 2016. Apple put FeliCa into the Japanese iPhone 7 and opened Apple Pay in Japan that October, and from that morning anyone buying a new iPhone could tap it on a ticket gate without buying an accessory first. Osaifu-Link's entire purpose was now a standard feature of the device it had been compensating for.

It kept running for another seven years anyway, because of what people were already wearing. They had bought the jackets and the watches on the strength of the app, some of them recently, and switching the app off would turn a working wrist device into a bracelet. FeliCa Networks carried it until the installed base thinned out.

~ the watch that outlived the app ~

The wind-down was announced on 4 November 2022, more than a year ahead. The iD card registration feature went first, in late April 2023. ANA's SKiP boarding service, one of the things you could hold on the chip, had already closed on 31 March that year. On 31 December 2023 the app stopped: no new downloads, no issuing, no deleting, no withdrawing a balance.

What it did not do was confiscate anything. Money already loaded onto a jacket or a watch before the last day kept working afterward at shop counters, and could still be topped up and still earned points, because that transaction happens between the chip and the till and never needed the app at all. Owners of the wena 3 kept their Suica too, managed from Sony's own wena app instead. The bridge came down and the far bank was still there.

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