How to Make an App Like Samsung Pay

Mobile wallets have quietly become one of the most used categories of software on the planet. Tap-to-pay at a coffee shop, a boarding pass pulled up at the gate, a loyalty card scanned at checkout — Samsung Pay bundled all of that into a single app and set a standard that fintech founders still benchmark against.

If you're planning to build something similar, the good news is that the payment rails, tokenization services, and SDKs you need are far more accessible than they were when Samsung Pay launched. The challenging news is that a wallet app is a regulated, security-critical product, and the engineering decisions you make in month one will shape what you can legally ship in month twelve.

This guide walks through what Samsung Pay actually does under the hood, the features you need for a credible first version, the tech stack, compliance realities, cost ranges, and how to go to market.

What Samsung Pay Actually Is

Before scoping a build, it helps to be precise about what you're replicating. Samsung Pay is not a single product — it's a bundle of capabilities:

Contactless card payments at physical terminals using NFC (and historically MST, Samsung's magnetic stripe emulation, now deprecated)
In-app and online checkout where the wallet acts as a payment method inside other merchants' apps and websites
Card vault management — adding, verifying, ordering, and removing credit, debit, and prepaid cards
Loyalty, membership, and gift cards stored alongside payment cards
Transit and transportation passes in supported regions
Peer-to-peer transfers and, in some markets, banking and investment features layered on top
Rewards and cashback to drive repeat usage

Critically, Samsung Pay never stores your real card number on the device. It uses tokenization: the card network (Visa, Mastercard, Amex) issues a device-specific token — a Device Primary Account Number, or DPAN — that is stored in secure hardware. If the device is compromised, the token is useless outside that device.

Understanding this distinction matters enormously for your architecture. You are almost certainly not going to store card numbers. You are going to broker tokens.

Decide Which Kind of Wallet You're Building

"An app like Samsung Pay" can mean several very different products with wildly different costs and regulatory burdens. Pick one deliberately.

1. A Pass and Loyalty Wallet

Stores loyalty cards, coupons, membership IDs, event tickets, and boarding passes. No card payments at all. This is the fastest path to market, avoids most financial regulation, and can be genuinely useful — especially for a retail chain, stadium, university, or transit authority.

2. A Card-on-File Wallet Using Existing Rails

Users add their cards; you tokenize through a payment service provider and let them check out in your ecosystem or tap at terminals via platform APIs. You lean on Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, or a local acquirer. Regulatory exposure is moderate and manageable.

3. A Full Issuing Wallet

You issue your own virtual and physical cards, hold balances, and process transfers. This is a neobank in wallet clothing. You'll need a banking or e-money license, or a Banking-as-a-Service partner who has one. Timeline and cost jump substantially.

4. A Crypto or Multi-Asset Wallet

Different problem entirely — key management, chain integrations, and a different compliance regime. Worth mentioning only because founders often conflate it with payment wallets. Don't.

Most teams should start at tier 1 or 2 and expand.

Core Feature Set for a Version One

Resist the urge to ship everything Samsung Pay does. Here's a defensible MVP.

Onboarding and Identity

Phone number or email signup with OTP verification
Biometric enrollment (Face ID, Touch ID, Android BiometricPrompt) as the primary unlock
Device PIN fallback
KYC flow if you're holding funds — document capture, liveness check, sanctions and PEP screening via a provider like Onfido, Persona, Sumsub, or Jumio

Card and Pass Management

Card capture via camera OCR plus manual entry
Issuer verification step (the "yellow path" — SMS or app-based confirmation with the bank)
Card art rendering pulled from network metadata
Default card selection and reordering
Suspend and delete a token remotely

Payment Execution

NFC tap-to-pay via Host Card Emulation on Android or the Secure Element where you have access
In-app payment SDK so partner merchants can accept your wallet
QR code payment as a fallback for markets and merchants without NFC terminals
Payment request sheet with amount, merchant, card selector, and biometric confirmation

Transactions and Receipts

Real-time transaction feed with merchant name, logo, category, and location
Digital receipts and attachment support
Search and filtering
Dispute or "I didn't make this" reporting flow

Security Controls

Remote device deactivation from a web portal
Session timeout and re-authentication for sensitive actions
Notification on every transaction
Spending limits and card freeze toggles

Loyalty and Rewards

Barcode and QR loyalty card storage
Automatic loyalty card surfacing at checkout
Points balance display via merchant API integrations
Cashback or points ledger if you're running your own program

Nice-to-Have for Later

Peer-to-peer transfers, split bills, transit passes, bill pay, subscription tracking, spend analytics, family accounts, and wearable companion apps. All valuable. None necessary on day one.

The Hard Part: NFC and Platform Access

This is where wallet projects get derailed, so be clear-eyed.

On Android, you have a real path. Host Card Emulation lets your app respond to NFC terminal requests without needing carrier or OEM permission for the secure element. You register an AID (Application Identifier) for the payment applet you're emulating, implement an HostApduService, and handle APDU commands. You can also set your app as the default contactless payment app. Combine HCE with a network tokenization service and you can genuinely tap to pay.

On iOS, you cannot. Apple restricts the secure element for payments to Apple Pay and, in the EU under the Digital Markets Act, to approved third parties through a specific entitlement process. For most teams, the practical iOS strategy is: store passes and loyalty cards, support in-app and online checkout, support QR payments, and integrate with Apple Pay rather than competing with it inside the tap-to-pay flow.

Plan your product story around this asymmetry from the start rather than discovering it in sprint fourteen.

Architecture and Tech Stack

Mobile Clients

Android: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, CameraX for card scanning, Android Keystore with StrongBox where available, BiometricPrompt, HCE
iOS: Swift, SwiftUI, PassKit for pass management, Secure Enclave, LocalAuthentication
Cross-platform option: Flutter or React Native can carry most of the UI, with native modules for NFC, keystore, and biometrics. Viable and increasingly common, but expect meaningful native work regardless.

Backend

Language and framework: Go, Kotlin/Spring, Node with TypeScript, or Python with FastAPI. Choose based on team depth, not fashion.
Architecture: Service-oriented from the start. Separate the identity service, card vault service, transaction ledger, notification service, and rewards engine. Payment systems need independent scaling and independent audit boundaries.
Data: PostgreSQL for transactional and ledger data with strict double-entry discipline. Redis for sessions and rate limiting. Kafka or a managed equivalent for event streaming between services.
Ledger: Do not treat balances as a column you increment. Use an append-only, double-entry ledger. Every movement is two entries. This is non-negotiable if you want reconcilable books.

Payment Infrastructure

Tokenization: Visa Token Service, Mastercard Digital Enablement Service, or a token requestor partner who fronts both
Acquiring and processing: Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, or a regional acquirer
Card issuing (if applicable): Marqeta, Galileo, Stripe Issuing, or a BaaS provider
Payouts and transfers: Local rails — ACH, SEPA, UPI, PIX, Faster Payments — via a provider rather than direct integration on day one

Infrastructure

Kubernetes or a managed container platform, infrastructure as code with Terraform, secrets in a dedicated vault (HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS plus Secrets Manager), HSM-backed key operations for anything cryptographic, comprehensive audit logging, and observability with distributed tracing. Multi-region if your uptime commitments demand it.

Security and Compliance

Treat this as a first-class workstream with its own budget, not a checklist you run before launch.

Standards You'll Encounter

PCI DSS — applies if card data touches your systems. Architecting to minimize scope (never handling PANs, using provider-hosted capture) is the single highest-leverage decision you can make.
PSD2 and Strong Customer Authentication — if you operate in Europe, two-factor authentication on payments is mandatory, with specific exemption rules.
GDPR, CCPA, and local data protection law — consent, data minimization, right to erasure, and often data residency requirements.
AML and KYC — customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting. Needed the moment you hold or move funds.
EMVCo specifications — if you're implementing contactless payment applets.
SOC 2 Type II — not legally required, but enterprise merchants will ask.

Engineering Practices

Certificate pinning on all API traffic
Root and jailbreak detection with graceful degradation rather than hard blocks
Anti-tampering and code obfuscation on release builds
Keys generated and held in hardware-backed storage, never in app code or shared preferences
Device attestation via Play Integrity and App Attest
Behavioral fraud scoring on the server — velocity checks, geolocation anomalies, device fingerprint changes
Independent penetration testing before launch and annually after
A documented incident response plan you've actually rehearsed

UX Principles That Make or Break a Wallet

A wallet lives or dies on the two seconds at the terminal.

Speed is the feature. From lock screen to payment-ready should be one gesture. Samsung Pay's swipe-up-from-bottom shortcut existed for exactly this reason. If your flow takes four taps, users go back to plastic.

Make the active card obvious. Users need certainty about which card is about to be charged, before it's charged.

Confirm loudly. Haptic feedback, a clear success animation, and a push notification. Ambiguity at the terminal is the worst possible outcome.

Degrade gracefully offline. Loyalty barcodes and pass display should work without connectivity. Cache what you safely can.

Be honest about failures. "Payment declined" is useless. "Declined by your bank — try another card or contact them" is actionable.

Design for one-handed use. People are holding a phone in one hand and groceries in the other.

Testing a Payment Product

Unit and integration tests with high coverage on the ledger and money-movement paths specifically
Contract testing against payment provider sandboxes
NFC hardware testing with real terminals across brands — Ingenico, Verifone, Square, PAX — because terminal behavior varies more than the spec suggests
Certification with card networks if you're implementing payment applets; budget months, not weeks
Load testing modeled on realistic peaks, not averages
Chaos testing on provider timeouts and partial failures — what happens when the authorization succeeds but your callback never arrives?
Reconciliation testing — daily settlement files versus your ledger, with automated break detection

Timeline and Cost

Ranges assume a competent team and exclude licensing fees and provider minimums.

Discovery, compliance scoping, and design: 4–8 weeks. $25,000–$60,000.

Pass and loyalty wallet (tier 1): 3–5 months. $70,000–$150,000.

Card wallet on existing rails (tier 2): 6–10 months. $180,000–$400,000.

Full issuing wallet (tier 3): 10–18 months. $400,000–$1,000,000+, plus licensing or BaaS setup fees.

Security audit and penetration testing: $15,000–$50,000 per cycle.

Ongoing: budget 20–30% of build cost annually for maintenance, compliance renewals, provider fees, and platform updates. Payment products do not have a "done" state.

Cost drivers that push you toward the high end: multiple geographies, multiple currencies, physical card issuance, in-house fraud engine, transit integrations, and network certification.

Go-to-Market Reality

Wallets suffer from a brutal chicken-and-egg problem: users won't install without merchant acceptance, and merchants won't integrate without users.

Ways teams break the loop:

Start inside an existing ecosystem. If you already have a retail chain, a delivery app, or a stadium, you have captive acceptance on day one.
Lead with loyalty, not payments. People install apps to get free coffee. Payment adoption follows the loyalty card.
Piggyback on existing rails. QR codes work everywhere a camera and a poster exist. Don't wait for NFC terminal upgrades.
Subsidize aggressively but temporarily. Cashback buys trial. Utility buys retention. Know which one you're paying for.
Target a specific vertical. Transit, campus, or a national retail consortium beats "a wallet for everyone."

Common Mistakes

Scoping tier 3 ambition with tier 1 budget
Discovering iOS NFC restrictions after committing to a roadmap
Treating compliance as a launch gate instead of an architectural input
Building a balance column instead of a ledger
Underestimating reconciliation and operations tooling — you need an internal admin console, and it's real product work
Ignoring customer support tooling until the first disputed transaction arrives
Assuming a single payment provider will cover every market you want

Final Thoughts

Samsung Pay looks simple because enormous complexity was hidden behind a single swipe. Recreating that experience is achievable — the tokenization services, issuing platforms, and mobile SDKs available today are genuinely powerful — but it rewards teams who make hard scoping decisions early.

Pick your tier honestly. Architect to keep card data out of your systems. Build the ledger properly from the first commit. Design for the two seconds at the terminal. And solve the acceptance problem before you solve the feature problem.

If you get those five things right, you have a real product. If you get them wrong, you have an expensive lesson in financial infrastructure.

Have a project in mind? Contact Sodio Technologies to discuss your requirements and explore the right technology solution for your business.