[EGreg]

I see ApplePay and Google Wallet as the Virtualization of payment, basically turning your credit card accounts into electronic accounts with per-device and per-payment tokens. Which means that security will be a lot easier, numbers can't get stolen, and the merchant now doesn't AUTOMATICALLY get your info from your credit card, while retaining the ability to track you (probably) as long as the Payment Processors allow it.

HOWEVER! It also means that these companies will need to integrate their new payment system deeper and make it compete with IAP on their own ecosystem. Since this system disrupts credit cards for real world purchases, it can't take a 30% cut. So you end up with two systems of payment, one which takes 30% and one which doesn't. You can bet your buttocks that publishers of online content will try to find ways to use the CREDIT CARD PROCESSING system instead of IAP, even if it means no fancy things like recurring subscriptions - things which ApplePay will have to add later. In short, Apple will have to bend over backwards to justify preserving the 30% cut on IAP. That 30% incidentally is also what keeps all apps from being free in the store - once IAP is cheap, why charge people 30% upfront for the app?

In short, I'm interested to see how Apple is able to keep ApplePay from cannibalizing its revenue from the App Store, by disrupting its own IAP service.

[logician76]

I agree that this is the most interesting thing to watch for, whether apps will go with ApplePay or IAP. However it seems that credit card transactions also have a fixed per transaction fee of 19 cents or higher, not sure what these are for ApplePay yet, but that could factor in when IAP are just 1 dollar amounts.