A survey estimates that Apple Pay users reached 507M worldwide in September 2020, about 50% of the total iPhone userbase, adding ~66M users from September 2019
IN a recent release, Apple reported that “more than 90% of stores in the US, 85% of stores in the UK, and 99% of stores in Australia accept Apple Pay.” Tweets: @counternotions and @brianroemmele Tweets: Kontra / @counternotions : The glaring absence is the Pay button at many notable online retailers/services, including the biggest one, Amazon. https://www.asymco.com/... Brian Roemmele / @brianroemmele : When I started PayFinders 2 years before Apple Pay was released I anticipated that by 2025 about 50% of iPhones would have active Apple Pay. I was wrong—it reached this milestone in 2020. Many doubted Apple would get into payments and if they did it would fail. It succeeded. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The 507M estimate caps a steep two-year climb: Loup Ventures counted just 127M global Apple Pay users, about 16% of iPhones in early 2018, then 215M, or 31% of the active base by August of that year. Hitting ~50% by September 2020 means the service doubled its share of the iPhone base in roughly two years, validating Brian Roemmele's PayFinders projection of 50% penetration by 2025 — reached five years early.
The milestone lands alongside Apple's own acceptance figures — more than 90% of US stores, 85% in the UK, 99% in Australia — which makes Kontra's observation about the missing Apple Pay button at major online retailers, Amazon foremost among them, the visible frontier where adoption is still blocked.
First-order effects
- With half the global iPhone base activated, Apple's wallet is no longer an early-adopter feature but a default expectation — putting pressure on holdout online merchants like Amazon, whose absent Apple Pay button now excludes a materially larger customer pool than it did in 2018.
Second-order effects
- Activation is outrunning usage: a later survey found 93.9% of US users with Apple Pay activated do not use it in stores, so the competitive fight shifts from getting the wallet onto phones to driving transaction frequency — where merchant acceptance and bank support decide outcomes.
- The trajectory continued after this data point: Loup Ventures reported 75% of US iPhones had Apple Pay activated by mid-2022, up from 10% in 2016, confirming the S-curve and forcing rival wallets to compete on incentives rather than distribution.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the wallet becomes a structural layer of the iPhone platform — extending Apple's gatekeeper position from app distribution into payments, with take-rate economics on transactions riding on top of an already-monetized device base.
The trend: Mobile wallet adoption is following a steep S-curve toward saturation of the smartphone base, shifting the battleground from activation to everyday transaction share.