Apple Pay: Here’s Where You Can Use It

Apple Pay was announced earlier this month alongside the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus as a digital wallet of sorts where you could buy goods using your iPhone at a handful of brick and mortar stores. The feature isn’t launching until next month, but here are all the places that support Apple Pay so far.

Apple Pay is essentially the company’s own digital wallet to take on the growing market of digital payment systems that have already been released by Google in the past. However, Apple aims to do it a bit differently.

Apple Pay 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 hack and the Target hack from a while back.

Furthermore, your iPhone can be disabled to make payments if your device ever gets lost or stolen, that way your credit card information itself can’t be stolen — much more effective than having to call the credit card companies to cancel a card if it ever gets lost or stolen.

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.

Here are the banks and the stores that support Apple Pay right now, with more coming in the future most likely.

Banks That Support Apple Pay

Currently, six major banks support Apple Pay, and they include American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citi and Wells Fargo.

Apple says that more banks will be coming soon, though, including Barclay, Navy Federal, PNC, USAA and US Bank.

If you’re currently a member of any of these banks, you’ll be able to add your credit or debit card from these banks quickly and easily

Stores That Support Apple Pay

Apple says that 220,000 store locations accept Apple Pay as a payment method, and that number will no doubt continue to grow into 2015 and beyond.

The company already lists a handful of national chains that will support Apple Pay once it launches next month, including McDonald’s, Panera Bread, Staples, Walgreens, Subway, Whole Foods, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, and the Disney Store. Babies R Us, Duane Reade, Sephora, Petco, Toys R Us, Unleashed and the Disney Store finish out the list that Apple has on their website.

Apps That Support Apple Pay

As for apps that will 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.

MLB.com is another app that will support Apple Pay, which isn’t too surprising considering that the MLB has had a close relationship with Apple, as the league worked closely with the Cupertino-based company to launch iBeacon in MLB stadiums across the country earlier this year.

Of course, it’s important to note that while the list of stores and apps is still rather short at this point, Apple Pay hasn’t even launched yet, so we’d take a big guess and say that more and more stores and shopping apps will add support for Apple Pay once the service launches to the public later next month.

Also, while Apple Pay will work on the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5, the iPhone 6’s NFC chip will allow consumers to tap their devices on the pay terminal in stores in order to instantly pay for goods. However, the NFC chip will be limited to Apple Pay only for now.

Apple mentioned during its keynote last week that the iPhone 6′s NFC was mostly for its Apple Pay system, but didn’t straight up say that the NFC chip was strictly limited to the mobile payment platform.

We’re not sure if Apple will open up access to its NFC chip to other uses besides its Apple Pay system, but for now, it’s being locked down to Apple Pay only. However, Apple has shown us that its NFC technology has capabilities beyond Apple Pay, including the ability for the Apple Watch to unlock a hotel room door with NFC.