Using Apple Pay with Face ID and face masks sucks after all. Semi-distracted Gruber: “Apple Pay with Apple Watch works well while wearing a face mask, but using your iPhone sucks.”
The moment I saw the ‘Only 6% of People with iPhones Use Apple Pay‘ survey advertisement appear on Apple news sites (they took the bait, mission accomplish!), I knew all the major Apple blog gasbags would clock in with their important opinions. And they did. Look folks, this survey stuff is a craps game. One thing I have learned in Japan is that payment survey data are all over the place. Reliable information is hard to find. PYMENTS.com sez their survey is ‘based on PYMNTS’ national study of 3,671 U.S. consumers conducted between Aug. 3-10, 2021.’ Okay but how, where, what’s the age spread and whom are we talking about here? Grandma’s in Savanna, Illinois? College kids in New York? PYMNTS also have an axe to grind to juice the story:
“Sept. 9, 2014 – when Tim Cook took the stage at Apple’s WWDC and introduced Apple Pay….The media and industry pundits went bananas. Reports predicted that soon, plastic cards would be a relic, and that Apple Pay at the point of sale would markedly eclipse their usage and utility.”
Ha ha stupid Apple fanbois, joke’s on you.
Let’s put all of this plastic vs Apple Pay, Face ID with face mask stuff aside for a moment and look at the long bumpy, horribly uneven American payments infrastructure. People in America are used to plastic but EMV chip cards are fairly new, contactless cards are even newer. And people are not used to face masks, it’s not part of the culture. I bet if PYMNTS did local surveys of people using Apple Pay Express Transit in New York (OMNY), Washington DC (SmarTrip), San Fransisco (Clipper), I guarantee you the Apple Pay usage rates are way higher because: (1) it’s incredibly convenient (2) Express Transit doesn’t care if you wear a face mask, it just works. Too bad those transit cards can’t be used for Express Transit payments too because people would use them…a lot.
Japan by comparison has higher Apple Pay usage rates, it was 27% back in 2018, and this before COVID and the Japanese government CASHLESS rebate campaign which did a lot to increase the contactless reader footprint for smaller merchants. But it’s simpler than that, I think the difference can be easily summed up with 2 points: (1) face masks are part of the culture in Japan, people are used to them, (2) paying for stuff using Apple Pay Suica, with or without a face mask, is incredibly fast, convenient and blends seamlessly with the long established transit IC standard with mobile making it far more useful.