Apple Pay Discover Card Support Coming This Fall

For those bearing a Discover credit or debit card, you may be pleased to know that Apple Pay Discover support will be rolling out later this year.

Discover made the announcement today that its cards would work in Apple Pay at stores and banks where Apple Pay is supported. There was no exact launch date given, but Discover says that Apple Pay support will roll out at some point in the fall, and could even possibly coincide with Apple’s annual fall event where they’ll announce a new iPhone and iOS version.

Discover is the last of the four major credit card companies to announce support for Apple’s new digital payment platform, with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express already on board.

Apple Pay is supported at a handful of major retail stores, including Walgreens, Office Depot, McDonald’s, Macy’s, and Staples. You can check out the full list here. The list of supported banks is also growing, with pretty much every major bank having support for Apple Pay, as well as a constantly growing number of smaller banks and credit unions.

Only a handful of major banks supported Apple Pay when it initially launched, including Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citi and Wells Fargo.

Apple Pay is essentially the company’s own digital wallet platform to take on the growing market of digital payment systems that already released by companies like Google. It allows you to store your credit card information on your iPhone and use it to buy stuff at any store that supports Apple Pay. The iPhone 6 has an NFC chip that allows you to tap the pay terminal at a store to instantly buy goods. Furthermore, doing this doesn’t give the store your credit card information, so you’re less susceptible to store hacks that steal credit card information, similar to the recent Home Depot and Target hacks.

Apple Pay also works with mobile shopping apps, allowing you to pay with a single touch of the Touch ID fingerprint sensor in shopping apps that support the feature. Furthermore, Apple says that 220,000 store locations accept Apple Pay as a payment method, and that number will no doubt continue to grow further into 2015 and beyond.

As for apps that accept one-touch payment with Apple Pay, there are plenty that are already on board with it. Some notable shopping apps include Groupon, Panera Bread, OpenTable, Starbucks, Sephora, Target, and even Uber.

Of course, the service isn’t without its problems, though. According to a survey done by Phoenix Marketing International, around 66% of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users have come across issues with Apple Pay.

Specifically, almost half of the users surveyed visited a store that were listed as an Apple Pay merchant only to discover that the users couldn’t use Apple Pay because the location wasn’t actually accepting the system or wasn’t ready to do so just yet.

Furthermore, other users said that Apple Pay took too long to process a transaction, and others said that the cashier wasn’t familiar with the new payment technology. A few shoppers surveyed also noted that some transactions would be initiated incorrectly or ran twice.

Many of these issues aren’t Apple’s own fault, but merely retailers and banks still being stuck in the dark ages. Luckily, it seems that banks are stepping up and giving attention to Apple Pay, as security concerns have been a slight issue for Apple Pay, but hopefully banks and retailers alike will improve the functionality of mobile payments in the near future.