Survey: 93.9% of US consumers with Apple Pay activated on their iPhones do not use it to buy items in stores, seven years after Apple launched the service
Remember this? — when Tim Cook took the stage at Apple's WWDC and introduced Apple Pay. — What the world saw …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple Pay's problem has never been distribution. Back in 2015, fewer than 25% of the top 100 US retailers even accepted it (a Reuters survey), and by September 2020 Asymco counted 507M users worldwide — roughly half the iPhone base. The wallet got installed everywhere; what lagged was the tap at checkout.
This PYMNTS finding sharpens that gap: seven years after Tim Cook introduced the service, nearly 94% of Americans who have activated Apple Pay on their iPhones still don't use it in stores. Activation, the metric Apple has long cited, turns out to be a weak proxy for actual payment behavior.
First-order effects
- Apple's pitch to US card issuers — whose economics ride on per-transaction volume rather than wallet installs — looks weaker when an activated wallet sits idle at the register.
- Retailers that invested in NFC terminal upgrades on the promise of contactless traffic are seeing demand-side adoption, not terminal availability, as the binding constraint.
Second-order effects
- Merchant-side expansion has effectively run its course: Loup Ventures found 75% of US iPhones have Apple Pay activated with 90% of US retailers accepting it by August 2022 (per the Wall Street Journal), so further growth must come from changing habits, not adding endpoints.
- Wallet rivals competing on the same iPhones are pushed to fight for default status and checkout incentives, since mere presence on the device demonstrably does not produce usage.
Third-order effects
- If the activation-versus-usage gap persists across wallets, the mobile-payments contest shifts structurally from distribution partnerships toward checkout-level persuasion — rewards, routing, and integration into commerce apps rather than hardware defaults.
- Regulators and merchants evaluating contactless infrastructure get a clearer signal that consumer behavior, not technology rollout, sets the ceiling on wallet-based in-store payments.
The trend: Mobile wallet adoption is being re-measured from activations to actual transaction frequency, exposing the gap between installing a payment method and using one.