Apple Pay Cash is a new feature that came alongside iOS 11.2. This feature is available on iPhone 6 and later, all iPad Pros, fifth-generation iPad, iPad Mini 3, and iPad Air 2 as long as they have iOS 11.2. However, this feature has been failing on a lot of models, users stated that they received an error message saying that the feature is unavailable. Apple recommends that if Apple Pay Cash is not showing up or is not functioning properly, customers should restart their device.
But, what is Apple Pay Cash and what does it mean for Apple?
Apple Pay Cash is a quick person-to-person payment platform. It allows users to send money through text like competing platforms: Venmo, Square Cash, (which is used by Snapchat for “Snapcash,” began in 2014) Zelle, and more. Apple Pay Cash can be activated by Siri and is a big move for Apple in this incredibly competitive, growing market. Many companies have made moves towards creating a payment platform because a middleman, such as one of the third-party apps mentioned above, can become an expensive and overly-commanding part of the process, and many have failed.
This is Apple’s next step in their movement of iOS towards a dominant, multi-faceted platform. Other steps in the past have been the creation of iMessage, News, and iCloud. These individual services seem unrelated, yet, they are creating Apple as the one-stop shop for everything: messaging, information, data storage, etc. Anything anyone could ever need will be provided by Apple, the iPhone, and iOS, which is exactly what Apple wants.
This probably originates from Apple’s Chinese competition: an app called WeChat. This incredibly popular app is predominantly used in China and provides people with all aspects of contemporary technology: messaging, GPS, social media, etc. This draws from iPhone sales in the massive market of China because people can purchase any phone, download WeChat, and they are good to go. Apple seeks to take down this competitor by delivering users everything they could possibly need, and this includes Apple Pay Cash. In fact, WeChat offers their own, aptly-named platform called WeChat Pay which does exactly what Apple Pay Cash provides.
We should expect to see more wide-ranged platform developments from Apple. We at The Real Mac Genius predict that within the next three or four years, Apple will release their own social media platform.
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