[braingenious]

To be clear, this is in practice basically a competitor for Venmo/Cash App/Paypal, but built into your iphone?

I only did a cursory glance at it but is there an Android app planned for this? In my experience, people want to send money to one another across different mobile OSes.

[warning26]

Yup, pretty much.

I can't imagine how Apple concluded that "It's exactly like Venmo in every way, but it only works for people with iPhones!" would make a particularly compelling value proposition.

[Gigachad]

The compelling value proposition is users trust Apple a shitload more than random startups and have enough apple user friends to make it work.

The sad part is that these apps are needed at all. In Australia the government just regulated that all banks must support free and instant money transfers and that email addresses and phone numbers be supported as addresses to send to.

So if your friend wants to send you money, you type their email on any bank app and it pops up with their legal name confirming you have the right person. The money shows up instantly.

[impulser_]

They don't release Android apps, therefore you still need to use Venmo and Cash App if you want to send money to someone. So people aren't going to use this over Venmo, Cash App or PayPal.

Google Pay supports iOS which is why it used over Apple Pay in countries where iPhones aren't the dominate mobile OS.

[ethanbond]

I mean... I singlehandedly disprove your claim. I use Apple Cash very frequently, even in cases where both parties have other apps on their phones. IMO they don't need to remove Venmo or Cash App from the market in order to have a meaningful product that adds value for their customers.

[muraiki]

Venmo has continually failed at privacy: https://www.legalreader.com/venmos-at-it-again-privacy-issue...

Privacy is an area where Apple tries to differentiate. It’s not great that this is Apple only, but it’s also nice that it just works.

[Biologist123]

Venmo not available to me in Europe. Can’t wait to have Apple Cash.

Like mobile money in Africa, various service providers will jump up to allow cross wallet transfers.

[konschubert]

People use paypal for this in Europe

EDIT: Ok, maybe just in Germany.

And just to be clear: Paypal is an adverse company that tries to trick its users on every page.

[_rutinerad]

I live in Northern Europe and I've never heard of anyone using Paypal for anything other than paying for things online. Each country has their own specific service that the majority uses (MobilePay, Siirto, Swish, etc).

[kekub]

It is pretty common in Germany (at least in my bubble) to transfer money via paypal to one another.

[nicoburns]

Does Germany not have fast bank transfers? In the UK, people used to use PayPal for this until the Faster Payments system came in, which meant that you can instantly transfer money to anyone with a UK bank account via your normal banking app.

I think it technically takes 24-48 hours to clear, but that doesn't tend to be an issue in practice. You'll get the push notification telling you the money has arrived and your balance will update in seconds.

[drclau]

I don't know anyone using Paypal for this scenario. However, people do use Wise and Revolut.

[pretext-1]

In my country (in EU) everyone uses it. Friends, colleagues, family, everyone. That part is great. But the app sucks. I wish PayPal would fix their app. Animations are buggy, it's slow (not really slow but slow enough to show a loading spinner every time) and navigating through the app is hard.

[drclau]

I did have to use Paypal recently to pay for HBO Max, because they would not accept debit cards for whatever reason, and I lost my patience with their support. You are right, the Paypal app is really bad.

You should give Wise and/or Revolut a try. The apps are way better, and probably one of the best features both have is virtual cards (Revolut has also a one-time card that is automatically destroyed after use). Note that you also get physical cards with both. I think Revolut has a few more features that Wise lacks, like travel and device insurance, but for the financial part, the features are nearly identical. Also, currency exchange rates are way better than traditional banks.

[weberer]

In Finland, I've only seen people use MobilePay

[ceeplusplus]

That's basically iMessage vs. FB Messenger/WhatsApp/Signal/SMS.

[mhb]

I've never used Venmo since I thought that it made your transactions public by default. Maybe this isn't even true, but I think it is and that just seemed so insane I didn't want to go anywhere near it.

[shrimpx]

For what it's worth, other big companies are building their own verticals, like Messenger Payments and Google Pay.

[giancarlostoro]

This will likely be like Facetime. I don't think Apple typically cares about this use case, just like nobody is going to use an Apple Card on an iPhone. This is targetted towards iPhone households (which seem to be rather common, as anecdotal as it may sound, I can count a dozen households where nobody has Android, and this meets their need).

I would use Zelle for cross device transfer or any of the other apps, it's not like we have a shortage of them. Although I agree it would be good if we had less of them to need to use.

[samatman]

> just like nobody is going to use an Apple Card on an iPhone

Is this sentence what you actually meant to say? It makes sense if the last noun is "Android".

[giancarlostoro]

Oops! You are correct, I meant to say Android.

[omni]

I'm sensing from your comment that you aren't aware that they made Facetime cross-OS. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619

[giancarlostoro]

I was not aware! Thanks for that link, everyone from my wife's family has iOS but my mom is still on Android, this is useful to know!