Apple Pay Recommends Six Processors—And PayPal’s Not One Of Them

On the one hand, Apple and PayPal have been partners for almost a decade, notes ReadWrite, going all of the way to the early iTunes Music Store days. But given that PayPal has been actively pushing its own mobile payment app as a retail in-store option, it’s not surprising that PayPal has been left out of Apple Pay’s marketing push. But they have been really left out, the ReadWrite story reported.

“Apple is recommending that developers integrating Apple Pay into their apps or websites use SDKs from one of six payment processors. PayPal and its Braintree Payments subsidiary isn’t one of them—but Braintree archrival Stripe is,” the story said, and then added that Apple strongly discouraged partners from straying from its list in this note to its developers. “Using one of these SDKs is highly recommended. Contact your payment provider for more information. The alternative is to provide your own server-side solution to receive payments from your app, decrypt payment tokens and interface with the payment provider. Handling credit and debit card payments can be complicated and unless you already have the expertise and systems in place, an SDK from a payment provider is the quickest and most reliable way to support Apple Pay in your app.”

The story talked a bit about Stripe’s own marketing efforts and said Stripe did so “to the point of stretching the truth. An E-mail from its PR agency falsely describes Apple Pay as being ‘built on Stripe.’ That’s not true, of course, and one imagines prideful Apple executives might take offense at the claim. In any event, Stripe was clearly briefed on Apple Pay early and allowed to build interfaces and write documentation available on the day of launch.”

Bill Ready, CEO of PayPal unit Braintree Payments, told ReadWrite that “Braintree’s V.zero software, which developers include in apps and websites to accept credit and debit cards, can easily add new forms of payment—as it plans to do with Bitcoin, for example. ‘We can handle these transactions,’ Ready (said). ‘Apple is very clear that you can use your existing payments provider.’ In fact, Braintree will accept Apple Pay payments from Braintree customers that build it into their apps. Uber, for example, is adopting Apple Pay to allow customers to pay for rides with a credit or debit card stores in their iTunes account.” (Listen to Ready discuss other Apple Pay issues in this PYMNTS podcast report.)