Technology

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In many ways, Google's Chrome OS platform is really starting to feel like a desktop version of Android. It looks like Android, it acts like Android, and it even runs Android apps. But for all their similarities, Chrome OS and Android still differ in some pretty significant ways.

One of those is how the two operating systems handle upgrades. Software updates on Chrome OS are much simpler, more frequent, and more consistent than what you see on Android — to put it mildly — and you as the user have far more visibility into what exactly is happening and what's ahead.

For quite a few years, Apple has made Apple Pay extremely easy to use, and one of its best ease-of-use tricks is to allow NFC-powered Apple Pay to launch the instant it detects an NFC signal. The user doesn't have to launch an app, or even to click on anything. The phone can be in airplane mode as well as not riding local Wi-Fi. Mere proximity to the signal does it all, with a quick finger scan or face glance being all that is needed to make the transaction happen.

Now, with iOS 12, Apple wants to share that magic with the industry, via an SDK. Well, not quite, but it's starting along that path.

Apple has been surprisingly quiet about this change, not even mentioning it during its Apple Developer Conference about iOS 12. Apple has also ignored Computerworld's request to discuss this new capability and hasn't been quoted on it anywhere that we can find.