Square is expanding into mobile payments on Android with a new Register API update.
The POS solutions company launched Register API this past March through its new ‘Build With Square’ initiative. It was part of a strategy shift that turned the company’s focus away from POS hardware and toward a more third-party solutions approach that would allow developers to integrate Square solutions into their own payment systems without having to fully commit to Square’s product ecosystem.
Now, with this latest update, developers can enable Square payments on their Android apps, which means end users can just swipe or tap their devices at a contactless POS terminal, and the Square Register platform will handle the rest. As Square’s Pierre-Yves Ricau put it in a blog post announcing the update, with Square Register, “all the money movement heavy lifting is taken care of.”
It’s a solution that could prove appealing to Android developers at a time when mobile payments are starting to rise in prominence. But with Android offering its own mPayment platform, it remains to be seen whether business will go to the trouble of integrating mPayments via their own apps rather than enabling Android Pay support. However that plays out, users should ultimately end up with more payment options.
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