> why the fuck do I need some shitty app to use your charger?

I have PHEV that doesn't pull much from a charger, and I usually don't use chargers for money, but... When I charged for fun while I was shopping at a grocery store, it ended up being like a 70 cent charge. If you bill 70 cents to a credit card, it doesn't make sense. Tieing it to an app, you can either charge more and have me loan you the balance, or you can wait until I acrue enough debt that it's economic to charge me.

With full EVs, they can usually pull enough current to reach a billable amount in a short time, but aggregating charges may still be useful.

This is where China has it right. You can pay 1 yuan by WeChat no problem. Scan the QR code, enter "1", the shop terminal says "1 yuan paid" out loud, job done. And yes some things are 1 yuan, for example picking up a parcel from a parcel locker a day late.

Yes, the entire economy is beholden to two payment portals (WeChat and Alipay) and I'm sure the analytics are off the scale and you're completely fucked if you can't use or get banned from the platform but the actual 99% user experience is exactly the microtransaction dream that people have been unable to solve in the west for decades.

It doesn't have to be an app to handle small transactions - different countries already have mechanisms in place to handle that - e.g. any credit card purchase under $5 gets a $1 surcharge, to avoid the surcharge you can tap with a debit card (with much lower transaction costs).

Paypal will do small payments for 9 cents plus 5%, or 7 euro cents plus 6.5%. That can handle pretty small charges.

And a charger network can have a running balance for small payments without a garbage app.