Apple Pay introduces website payments but punts on peer-to-peer money transfer

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

In the keynote presentation of this week's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, Apple announced that it would allow website developers to add an Apple Pay button to the checkout part of their sites. The company also revealed that iMessage will now be open to apps from third-party developers, and one of Apple's spokespeople demonstrated this new openness by sending money to a friend using an iMessage-compatible Square Cash app. Both of these new announcements will make buying things easier in the Apple ecosystem, but neither seems to be the kind of development that will (singlehandedly) propel Apple to dominate the payments market.

Apple's Web-payments function, called "Pay with Apple Pay," only works in Safari for now. The aim is to reduce any friction a customer might experience while checking out after a little e-shopping spree-the customer just selects the Apple Pay button during checkout and then authenticates the transaction using TouchID on their phone or by tapping an Apple Watch associated with the computer the purchase is being made on. After all, if you don't have to track down your credit card and find the right security code to input, you're less likely to get distracted from your capitalist urges or have time to think about whether you should really be buying a 5lb gummy bear.

That's something PayPal and Amazon have tried to perfect, and although Apple Pay's latest features have been described as challenging PayPal, there's room for some caution in that prediction. Thad Peterson, a Senior Analyst at independent research firm Aite Group, noted that PayPal is global, platform agnostic, and has a 12-year head start on Apple Pay.

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