Loup Ventures: Apple Pay has an estimated 38M active users in the US and 127M globally, up from 62M a year ago, equating to around 16% of global iPhones
Apple Pay is continuing to grow year-on-year, according to research by Loup Ventures, but while the adoption rate for Apple Pay …
Context & Ripple Effects
Loup Ventures' February 2018 estimate lands mid-arc for Apple Pay: the service had just come off a year of 450% transaction growth driven by its 2016 push into international markets, and six months later the same firm would revise the global figure upward to 215M users. This report is the first snapshot pegging penetration at ~16% of global iPhones.
The trajectory held: a 2020 survey put users at 507M worldwide (~half the iPhone base), and by 2022 Loup counted 75% of US iPhones with Apple Pay activated, with Apple claiming 90% US retailer acceptance. The 16%-of-iPhones baseline here is the early data point that made those later numbers plausible.
First-order effects
- Apple converts more of its installed base into an active payments audience — 38M US users per Loup — giving issuers and card networks a fast-growing channel whose terms Apple helps set.
Second-order effects
- Rival wallets (Google Pay, Samsung Pay) must match Apple's device-tied distribution, and merchants face pressure to upgrade terminals as acceptance becomes a customer-expectation issue rather than a differentiator.
Third-order effects
- If wallet adoption keeps tracking iPhone penetration, the default payment layer consolidates around whoever controls the handset — a structural shift that eventually draws antitrust and interchange scrutiny toward platform owners like Apple.
The trend: Mobile wallets are riding smartphone installed bases from niche feature toward default payment rail, with device makers rather than banks controlling the front door.