Apple Pay may have reached critical mass now: our experiences (in and around London, it’s true) suggest that more shops now accept it than don’t, while even Barclays joined the scheme eventually.
But at WWDC 2017 this summer, Apple announced a significant expansion of the service’s scope: you’ll soon be able to use it to make payments between people, rather than to businesses. No longer will your feckless mate be able to claim that he left his wallet at home: he can pay you that money he owes using his iPhone or even his Apple Watch.
In this article we talk you the process of making a peer-to-peer payment using Apple Pay Cash over iMessage, on an iPhone or Apple Watch.
Pay via iMessage
Peer-to-peer Apple Pay works within iMessage, which is increasingly looking like an app platform in its own right rather than simply one single-use app. Obviously you and the payee both need to be using Apple devices, and to have active iMessage accounts, for this to work.
On the iPhone, you open the Messages app, open (or create) an iMessage thread with the person you want to pay – by sending a message saying “Here comes the money I owe you”, for example – then tap the little Apple Store icon (the capital A) followed by the Apple Pay icon. Then you enter the amount, verify with Touch ID or Face ID, and the money is on its way.
The feature will also work on Apple Watch, but we don’t yet know how: at present you don’t see the app drawer when viewing iMessages on the watch. Perhaps Apple plans to add this to Messages on the watch, but it seems more likely that you’ll do a double-tap on the side button, as you do currently to activate Apple Pay, and then select some option from that point that isn’t currently available.
Where does the money go?
Not into your bank account – at least not right away.
The peer-to-peer payment is transferred to an Apple Pay Cash Card, which lives in the Wallet app on your iPhone. You don’t need to have signed up with Apple Pay for this to work – the card is created without any of your bank details needing to be involved. It’s like a virtual bank account, and the advantage of this is it means the transfer is instant.
However, while you can access this money right away, you can do so only in Apple-approved ways; when making payments via Apple Pay, in other words. If you don’t want to do that, then you’ll want to transfer the money to your actual real-life bank account.
When we say that the Cash Card lives in Wallet on your iPhone, we should clarify that this is only where you can find the details: the payment record itself is saved off-device, so it won’t be lost if your iPhone is stolen.
When will Apple Pay Cash launch?
Soon! It will roll out in an update to iOS 11, and we know that Apple is testing the feature already.
The bad news for British readers is that the service will be US-only at first. Stay tuned for word on when the UK version will appear; we hope it will follow on reasonably quickly, given that this country was the second to get Apple Pay back in the day.
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