INSIDE Secure, a leading provider of NFC hardware and other secure communication products for use inside smartcards, smartphones, and other mobile devices has announced that they’re launching a further abstracted API for accessing Android NFC. From the looks of it, the release is part of a marketing and value scheme in order to make their hardware more enticing to potential customers and hardware developers.

Bill Ray over at The Reigster UK covers a bit of this announcement,

The new implementation of the Open NFC (Near Field Communications) API will be available for download from the end of the month, with Inside Secure claiming that its abstraction layer makes the stack more hardware independent than the competition, but also that it’s compatible with Android version 2.4. That claim is more surprising when you consider Android 2.4 has yet to be announced.

Given that Android version 3, Honeycomb, seems to be a fork aimed at higher-power devices, it’s not surprising to see confirmation that there will be a new incremental version for handsets, nor that the Open NFC API will support it.

Alright, so there’s some high-handed claims being made by INSIDE Secure, but we can set some of that aside right now. We don’t actually have their API yet so most of this is going to be speculation anyway. I’ll just come out and say that as incremental OS development goes for the Android OS, it’s unlikely that 2.4 is actually going to have that many design changes when it comes to an NFC API and so claiming 2.4 support isn’t all that out-there.

The Nexus S handsets, running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) already offers programmers very limited access to the NFC hardware; providing a public API limited to reading tags.Undocumented APIs have been discovered to allow writing tags too, but interacting with the secure element (essential for the more interesting applications of NFC) is still impossible until Google/Samsung releases a software update.

The secure element of NFC will be essential for using it as the next-big-thing when it comes to making smartphones interactive with the rest of the world when it comes to enabling them to become digital wallets. In order to allow phone-to-phone or even phone-to-store payments, something must protect the secure information about the individual making the payment and both phones must also contact their respective financial institutions to verify and authorize the transaction. Since this is a very public formulation of a transaction, the secure element, and the ability to read/write tags will become paramount.

We have seen what the read/write capability can do already in demos from some faculty at Stanford, where they show how it could be used for social applications. The ability for two phones to interact by trading a small amount of information in order to fashion a connection between them shows how effective this technology can be. We should expect to see a lot more demonstrations of simple concepts in the time to come.

There’s no details yet on an exact date for INSIDE Secure’s API.

Perhaps we will afterwards see a sudden broadening of innovation involving the usage of NFC after that. Even if it happens to just surround demonstrations of what it will do for us.

The first thing we might need to overcome, and a factor I read into this article in The Register, happens to be standards fragmentation. If different hardware offers different ways to do the same thing or if different hardware does different things we will see a divergence in core standards. Yes, each of the manufacturers should be concerned that their competitors will gain better adoption due to having a stronger API, better abstraction, and greater range of capability.