Apple Pay's Biggest Frustration Could Be Fixed In iOS 16
One of the major annoyances with using third-party browsers on devices running iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 is the lack of support for Apple Pay. People wanting to make in-browser online payments on e-commerce platforms have no other option but to use Apple's Safari browser if Apple Pay is their payment option of choice. This lack of Apple Pay support on browsers other than Safari has been bothering Apple Pay users for a while now. However, it now seems Apple has finally decided to address this annoying issue — albeit in a limited manner.
According to a recent MacRumors report, Apple could open up Apple Pay support for a select bunch of third-party browsers when the stable versions of iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 drop later this year. In fact, for several users of iOS 16 Beta and iPadOS Beta, this feature is already live. While the fact that Apple had begun supporting third-party browsers was a topic of discussion on several Apple-centric Reddit groups for over a month, a recent tweet by Steve Mosser of MacRumors brought the topic into focus again.
What browsers are currently supported?
On July 30, Mosser tweeted a screenshot showing how he could use Apple Pay using third-party browsers on a device running the latest version of iOS 16 Beta. Steve Mosser and a couple of others confirmed that they could use Apple Pay on iOS 16 Beta and iPadOS Beta with third-party browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. Interestingly, the feature only seems to have been enabled on the iPhone and tablet versions of these browsers on devices running either iOS 16 Beta or iPadOS 16 Beta.
Notably, Apple Pay support continues to elude MacOS versions of these same third-party browsers. According to Mosser, the primary reason for Apple Pay not working on macOS versions of third-party browsers is the fact that on macOS, these browsers use a different rendering engine from that of Safari. Given that mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay face a lot of competition from contactless cards for in-store transactions, it is rather strange to see Apple restricting the use of Apple Pay on online platforms.
Notably, the arrival of third-party browser support on the beta versions of iOS 16 and iPad 16 does not necessarily mean that the feature would eventually make it to the stable versions of these platforms later this year. However, we can only hope that before the end of 2022, Apple Pay will become browser-agnostic across all Apple platforms.