Large Paris regional transit authority Île-de-France Mobilités is finally moving closer to supporting mobile ticketing on a range of Android phones using host-card emulation technology from Google, after having rejected the technology as not secure enough.
Île-de-France Mobilités, or IDFM, which oversees public transit in the Paris region and manages the Navigo fare-collection program, has been hesitant to support mobile ticketing on Android phones without NFC secure elements on which to store its ticketing applet and its customers’ tickets and daily, weekly and monthly passes. Unlike a number of other large transit authorities, IDFM has also been hesitant to support the pay-as-you-go fare model, so the tickets and passes stored on Navigo cards are prepaid. The authority does not support open-loop payments, either.
Apple’s iPhones, unlike most Android phones, do come with embedded secure chips, but IDFM does not have a deal with Apple to put a digital version of the Navigo card on the iPhone. Instead of secure elements, Android generally supports host-card emulation, or HCE, which enables card issuers, including banks and transit authorities and operators, to load digital versions of their cards in software on the devices.
