Apple Pay Availability Reaches 700,000 Locations

For anyone out there who finds it hard to believe that Apple Pay only launched a few months ago, you are in good company.

Despite the fact that Apple’s payment service has only been available for a short time, it’s already caught on and to a staggering degree. In fact, Apple Pay support is now available at over 700,000 locations, as revealed during the Apple event in San Francisco, which included new details on the Apple Watch.

Now that Apple Pay is a part of the Apple Watch platform, there are likely to be still more uses for this service taking advantage of its incredible portability.

For instance, when the Apple Pay system launched, it worked with only six banks. Today, that number has skyrocketed to over 2,500 banks, and the numbers are likely to keep going from there.

Even vending machines are getting involved; right now, Apple Pay can be used with 40,000 vending machines, and by the end of the year, that number will more than double to 100,000, if all goes as planned.

Parking meters, laundry machines, national parks… the number of applications for this payment system are steadily, and almost frantically, on the rise.

But this doesn’t mean that Apple is sitting on its laurels, either; reports suggest that Apple Pay is already being worked on to make it even easier to use, as well as safer.

According to a report from Gartner, the mobile payments market is on track to reach $720 billion in transactions by 2017, up from $235 billion in just 2014.

That’s a huge hike in a short period of time, so it’s small wonder that companies like Apple are looking to get in on the action.

A platform like Apple Pay, that’s so closely connected to Apple devices, allows Apple to take advantage of its already substantial install base and get that comparatively captive market in on Apple’s side.

Given that Apple customers have already been shown to be more interested in making purchases on their devices, giving said customers one more way to do so is a smart idea by any measure.

While just putting Apple Pay in users’ hands won’t mean universal purchasing, Apple finding another way to make money out of its current product line is just a smart move.