One of the most prominent feature of iOS 6 is an application called Passbook. With the help of Passbook, all of your coupons, tickets and loyalty cards wouldn’t be cluttered anymore inside third party applications. Instead we have one native application from Apple which would take care of them. However, one thing which won’t be included in Passbook is mobile payments capability.
As per WSJ, Apple didn’t provide this feature into Passbook deliberately. There had been deep discussions on this topic last year. Some of the Apple engineers asked for a solution which would integrate mobile payment system more aggressively. But Apple executives decided to opt for ‘go-slow’ approach for now.
WSJ notes that Apple’s SVP of WorldWide Marketing Phill Schiller said that all of the mobile payments services are fighting with each other for a piece of pie and we aren’t doing that. Although Apple engineers have been experimenting with NFC and Bluetooth solution, but Apple’s CFO questioned about the security of NFC. Due to which Phill Schiller was worried that it would cause their customers to have a bad experience with a merchant.
Hence, they decided to back off with mobile payments and release scaled down version called Passbook. What do you think? Let’s know in comment section.