How Apple Pay’s winning combination of innovation and patience paid off
A good article in the WSJ, “Wait, When Did Everyone Start Using Apple Pay?”, reports on something I have been observing for a long time: more than 75% of smartphone and smartwatch owners now use their devices to pay for goods, making up more than 92% of all mobile payments, while Android Pay or Samsung Pay have clearly failed to gain traction.
What does Apple Pay have that other systems lack? In 2014, when Tim Cook said at a presentation that Apple Pay would make the wallet obsolete, very few people took him seriously. How wrong they were.
The Apple Wallet is not simply a means of payment, but how an increasing number of people store tickets, boarding passes, train tickets, driving licenses, loyalty cards and a whole host of other things, simply and reliably. But while practically everything that can be done with Apple’s wallet can also be done with the myriad wallets that appear in a search in the Play Market, the reality is that very few Android users bother: around 5% of have tried one, and less than 1% use it, despite the convenience. Samsung Pay? About the same: 5.1% of users have tried it, and less than 1.4% employ it regularly.
What does this say about Apple’s adoption process? Simply, patience. Paying in cash is a deeply rooted practice, and which is gradually…
