This truly sucks, since in this day and age we need unmodified phones for banking apps (and I think for oncall my company requires Android/iOS as well). I guess this will be the final push for me to change to iOS, since I already have a bunch of Apple stuff otherwise, and I was holding out on the phone side for this exact feature.
The only time I've seen this feature be used is when my grandma accidentally turns it on in the family groupchat - I just don't wanna hang out with my friends in WhatsApp
There is a difference between business owners (who don't want to spend money unless they have to) ans managers (who want career growth and are not necessarily worried about the company 's bottom line wrt headcount)
You use your bank's phone app. You can scan a QR code or you can send money to someone if you know their "id string", like a phone number, an email or a random string of numbers - you choose the "id string" format you want, and you can have different "ids" linked to different bank accounts. There are no physical cards.
I've seen them at trade shows and heard good things. I had also heard that Google tried buying them last year but it didn't go through, I'm curious about how/why they did it now
It really depends on where in the city you live - I live in the north of Paris and so far this has not affected me in any way. In fact, I already went to a couple of Olympic matches (a bunch of sports have started already), and I'm enjoying it immensely.
The city center had restricted access for about a week and is completely inaccessible for 2-3 days, which sucks for the people that live and work there, but it's a far cry from the `several weeks` you mentioned. I think folks are blowing the impact of the opening ceremony way out of proportion.