Why Apple Pay sticker deserves to be 4x size of Visa’s

by Igor

Huge Apple Pay sticker recently added below other payment methods

Less than two weeks ago (June 19, 2018) Apple Pay launched in Poland.
And yesterday I noticed a huge Apple Pay sticker on one of the self-checkout point in a local store selling household items.

First I noticed the sticker wasn't incorporated into the machine's aesthetics and was added later, probably because the machine was assembled before Apple Pay got introduced. Second thing I noticed there was no Android/Google Pay/Wallet. Last stop - take a look at the size of that Apple Pay's logo - it's huge! and bigger than 2 Visa and 2 MasterCard logo's combined.

The size difference isn't accidental, and it shows the significance of this payment platform before others, even the long-standing traditional ones.

Everything goes mobile, so are the payments. But again, why's there no Google Pay sticker then? Especially when in 2017 out of the 8.8 million phones sold in Poland only 8.5% were iOS devices and a whopping 91.5% were Android.

If you consider Poland's population with almost 38 million people, the mobile usage penetration of 81% you can extrapolate the the numbers above and get:

  • 30.78 M Poles on average have a mobile phone
  • 28.16 M (91.5%) of them are running Android
  • 1.62 M (8.5%) have iOS phones

Please keep in mind though - the figures above aren't really precise, and aren't taking into account cases when one person may have more than one phone, another may have no phone at all, so you can't consider each device as a potential means of payment. Many of the sold devices don't support NFC (used for the payments) either. All numbers exclude smart watches (iOS an Android) and Macs - all enabled with the competing payment systems. Also there are no Windows Mobile numbers, not that anyone buys those anyway ?

What striked me more than the fairly usual market shares are the results of Apple Pay's rollout. In the first 10 days the unofficial number of new Apple Pay users reached 200 000 people! Which is 12.3% of the whole iOS userbase! When out of 28 million Android users within more than 1.5 years a total of 300 000 people (with a mere 1.1%) enabled Google Pay.

As one of the commenters to the news topic said:

Adoption rates proves that Apple has an army, not just a bunch of customers

Which is true and definitely drives the rates. If you ask me, my bank wasn't in the first 8 banks ready at day one, so I went to another one, opened an account there and joined the service.