Finally, our prayers are being answered and Apple is opening up a very crucial feature to the general public. At its WWDC event, Apple has announced that its opening up its Apple Pay feature to the general public.
In case you need a refresher, Apple Pay is a service that until now, allowed folks using various devices affiliated with the iOS ecosystem to make payments with a wave of their smartphones. The service is compatible with the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, 7, 7 Plus, iPhone SE, iPad Air 2, iPad Pro and the Apple Watch.
Of these, users with an iPhone 5, 5C, 5S, 6, 6 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, 7, 7 Plus and iPhone SE can use the service through an Apple Watch. However, they lack the Touch ID security. Up until now, the service supported user to merchant transactions and peer to peer payments were a no go. Which meant that people had to resort to third party apps like PayPal and Square to transfer funds to friends and colleagues.
That is all set to change though, as Apple has announced that people will now be able to use the Apple Pay service to make payments to your friends from within the messages app. We can expect more details on this shortly but as the case may be, third party payment applications are in for a nasty Tuesday.
Everyone who uses Apple devices, will now have the option to pay others natively through their iPhones or iPads. So unless we are taking about iOS to Android or some such payments, third-party apps could well be driven to extinction unless they offer users something that Apple Pay can not.
Stay tuned for more news from WWDC, and do check out what’s been happening with the WatchOS and the MacOS.
