PayPal is now a payment option in Apple’s online stores, in something of a coup in the increasingly heated digital payments wars.
Users in North America, Australia, and much of Europe – Austria, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain – can now add their PayPal accounts to make purchases in Apple’s App Store, iTunes, iBooks, and Apple Music. They can also ask Siri, Apple’s flagship AI assistant, to make payments via the PayPal mobile app.
It’s the latest move underscoring PayPal’s trans-competitive approach to the burgeoning digital payments market, coming immediately after the company teamed up with Samsung to bring PayPal to that company’s Samsung Pay mPayments platform. With the rise of Samsung’s digital payments ecosystem and PayPal’s incursions into the mobile sector, the companies are essentially rivals; but PayPal evidently determined that the smartest approach was one of cooptation.
That is perhaps even more the case with Apple, whose Apple Pay platform has led the charge beyond the mPayments and into the kind of online commerce that PayPal has come to dominate. The company is even getting ready to launch a P2P payments feature for its iOS users that would directly compete against PayPal’s Venmo app. And given that Apple is notoriously resistant to working beyond its own software and hardware ecosystem, few could have seen the integration of PayPal into its online stores coming, though it remains notably absent from Apple Pay – for now.
Follow Us