91–100 of 203 posts
Apple already had Apple Pay. What's better about the new one?
Apple Pay is consumer -> business, so you can buy groceries at Whole Foods. This is consumer -> consumer. Letting me send my friend $5 to split the tab on the pizza he's ordering or a quick $20 birthday gift to a niece.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of encrypted messaging apps but only iMessage is actually usable, plus Apple already has your billing info.
Whatsapp would like to have a word with you. With iMessage you have to turn off SMS to make it really secure and once you do that you lose the ability to communicate with a large number of non-iOS users. OTOH Whatsapp is secure by default.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
surely having a large market share Having a large market share of what, the smartphone market? It's the users of the peer-to-peer payment service/application that they need, and they have 0 of those right now. Venmo already has millions of those users (many of whom who use iPhones) due to a good UX/UI and seamless integration with all major banks/card providers. So what value does apple bring to the table if my netwo…
Having a large market share of what, the smartphone market? It's the users of the peer-to-peer payment service/application that they need, and they have 0 of those right now. I think having a large smartphone platform to which you can roll out new features is really useful! There are what – maybe 4-5 million active Apple Pay users? That's a decent chunk of in-built market for the service, assuming it's seamlessly ava…
=========================================
Venmo was started by UPenn alums so it was popular among my friends long before it was a phenomenon (one of my good friends interned there and wrote the BlackBerry app). I used to use it exclusively by SMS starting around 2011. It used to be smart enough where I could text in "Pay John $5 for food" and it would figure out which John I meant and do it. I loved that. It's been amazing to watch Venmo grow to what it is now. If I could only keep three apps on my smartphone, I would choose Uber/Lyft, Venmo, and Google Maps. I can't navigate my life without all three of those. In my last year of college my Venmo year in review showed that I had spent $17k on Venmo and received $18k. So not a huge net, just a constant movement of money in and out among my friends (rent, food, parties, etc). If I had to use cash we would have never been able to make the small things work, and if I had to use PayPal I would have accrued $100s to $1000s in fees. So basically: thank you Venmo. You make my life measurably simpler.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which means they don't have a huge incumbency.
I'm at school in upstate NY. Venmo dominates here as well. It's doing pretty well, but honestly is an unimpressive product.
The key to the product is the strength of the network. They got all the major banks and CC providers to sign onto the platform, which was unprecedented. So from that standpoint, it's a fantastic product.
With all the available options why would you want to use a service that requires you to figure out if the other person uses an iPhone?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And given the number of Android devices in the wild far, far surpasses the number of iOS devices... using this service seems like more of a hassle than not.
In NYC, iPhone users seem pretty heavily concentrated in Manhattan. This means certain groups of people are probably hanging out in nearly entirely iPhone user enclaves. [0] [0] - http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-ma...
[1] here's a deconstruction of the data in the article: http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/158143/twitter-heat-map-sho...
[2] here's one explanation why: http://readwrite.com/2013/01/29/why-do-americans-hate-androi...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of encrypted messaging apps but only iMessage is actually usable, plus Apple already has your billing info.
Whatsapp would like to have a word with you. With iMessage you have to turn off SMS to make it really secure and once you do that you lose the ability to communicate with a large number of non-iOS users. OTOH Whatsapp is secure by default.
Source, please?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the key differences here (for me at least) between an apple only app (assuming that is the case) and something like square cash is that if the person I want to send money to doesn't have an iPhone, I wouldn't be able to send them money, whereas if they don't have square cash I can tell them to download it and then send them money and with the current promotion, even get $5 for referring them.
Absolutely true - but i imagine the conversation is: "I want to send you money. Do you have an iPhone?" "Yes" "Okay, here's the money." versus "Do you have an iPhone?" "No" "Okay, download SquareVenmoPal and I'll send it to you". There's a built-in audience for Apple Pay that might prove to be beneficial.