Apple Pay’s Key Rival Showing Faster Growth Rates

March 4, 2024 by
Apple Pay’s Key Rival Showing Faster Growth Rates

Naming a rival for Apple Pay might be simpler than some would expect, and for many, the first name to crop up is Samsung Pay.

While Samsung Pay is still a comparatively smaller proposition than its rival, there is some disturbing news connected to it as new reports suggest Samsung Pay has a faster growth rate than Apple Pay.

While Apple Pay has more monthly users than both Samsung Pay and Android Pay put together, Samsung Pay is growing more rapidly.

Interestingly, Android Pay is also putting on some clear growth patterns, and that too will mean another major competitor for Apple Pay. Worse yet for Apple Pay here is that Apple Pay actually has a head start on its biggest competitors, one that goes back almost a year.

There are serious difficulties associated with comparisons among the various products.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that neither Samsung Pay nor Android Pay are likely to work on Apple devices, in much the same way that Apple Pay likely will never work on a Samsung or other Android device. Each platform is essentially in its own walled garden.

Plus, Apple Pay was really a trailblazer here; before Apple Pay, mobile payments were a much thinner industry, often focused on credit cards.

Apple Pay did a lot of education and telling people about how this was a good idea. Samsung Pay could capitalize on that, and better yet, it didn’t need agreements the way Apple Pay did.

It could work with the current generation of terminals, so it could work in more places. However, Samsung Pay still only worked on certain devices, so its growth, too, was limited.

Android Pay has a much larger pool, and could be the one that really takes the market by storm. However, it’s important to note here that Android Pay—and even Google Wallet—may not fare well on Apple and Samsung devices.

These users are more likely to stick to the branded platform’s payment system; when you have Samsung Pay, why trade it for Google Wallet unless there’s a clear incentive? There are a lot of options in mobile payments, and the markets are shaping up to have quite a bit of competition in the months to come.

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