AppleInsider Staff
Apple might soon have all four major U.S. card issuers on board with its new Apple Pay service, as Discover confirmed on Tuesday that the firm is in talks to sign on. Meanwhile, Apple's new Swift programming language has hit version 1.0 as iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite near release.
"We are in discussions with Apple to add Discover cards to Apple Pay in the future," a Discover representative told a customer on Twitter. No timetable was given as part of the 129-character missive.
Discover is the fourth-largest card issuer in the U.S., and is tied with rival American Express as the most customer-friendly issuer in the nation. Like American Express, Discover has relatively few bank partnerships, thanks in large part to exclusionary clauses in contracts that banks signed with dominant players Visa and Master Card. Those policies were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2004.
Apple will roll out Apple Pay, its new NFC-based mobile payment service, to U.S. customers in October. The service was announced alongside the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and Apple Watch and will allow owners of those devices to pay with their stored credit and debit cards at brick-and-mortar retail establishments with a simple tap. Developers are also able to integrate Apple Pay into apps and websites.
Going unnoticed during Tuesday's event was the release of Swift version 1.0, which the Swift team said represents the Golden Master release — or the version they intend to ship in production — Â for iOS. Swift for OS X will hit GM as the release of OS X Yosemite draws closer.
"You'll notice we're using the word 'GM,' not 'final,'" the Swift team wrote on their official development blog. "That's because Swift will continue to advance with new features, improved performance, and refined syntax. In fact, you can expect a few improvements to come in Xcode 6.1 in time for the Yosemite launch."
Swift was announced at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June of this year. The new language can be used to compile apps for iOS 7, iOS 8, OS X Mavericks, and OS X Yosemite and is slated as a long-term replacement for Apple's Objective-C.
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49 Comments
I still find it funny that there were a ton of people saying that Apple would never use NFC as a payment system when it was the only logical choice. This is the biggest excitement for me as it's eventually going to be good for everyone.
Apple pay will be huge.
It's not getting the press that the new iPhones and the Apple watch are getting. Understandable. But I still think that the Apple pay announcement was the biggest thing announced yesterday. I know there are toads and trolls that will say big whoop, apple finally adopted NFC. It's not like they invented it. And they are right. But they miss the point. Up until now adoption of NFC has been sporadic at best and the implementations a farce. What Apple did was make it more secure, and they did the leg work to get all the major players on board. That's the hardest part and the historic part of it.
[quote name="RORWessels" url="/t/182201/discover-in-talks-to-join-apple-pay-swift-goes-gm-at-version-1-0#post_2594224"]It's not getting the press that the new iPhones and the Apple watch are getting. Understandable. But I still think that the Apple pay announcement was the biggest thing announced yesterday. I know there are toads and trolls that will say big whoop, apple finally adopted NFC. It's not like they invented it. And they are right. But they miss the point. Up until now adoption of NFC has been sporadic at best and the implementations a farce. What Apple did was make it more secure, and they did the leg work to get all the major players on board. That's the hardest part and the historic part of it.[/quote] I agree this is an amazing accomplishment. I've been talking about this very thing for years now but even though the path was clear the difficulty is getting those dominos in place to make this a reality. I believe this is truly a paradigm shift in the safety and security of our digital payments. What's funny is I've been fighting for years trying to get others to see the benefit of NFC but repeatedly failed attempts by other vendors tainted that open technology with many posters here.
[quote name="SirLance99" url="/t/182201/discover-in-talks-to-join-apple-pay-swift-goes-gm-at-version-1-0#post_2594187"]I still find it funny that there were a ton of people saying that Apple would never use NFC as a payment system when it was the only logical choice. This is the biggest excitement for me as it's eventually going to be good for everyone.[/quote] Primarily good for Apple because the millions of watch and 6/+ buyers are going to use Apple Pay for everything and Apple will be making a cut from each purchase. It was genius for Apple to add Pay to the Apple Watch because now buyers of the 5s/5c that can't upgrade to 6/+ can purchase the Watch in order to use Apple Pay. That'll help boost Watch sales as well as Apple Pay adoption all of which means more $$$ for Apple.