Loup Ventures: 75% of US iPhones now have Apple Pay activated, up from 50% in 2020 and 10% in 2016; Apple says 90% of US retailers now take Apple Pay
It took longer than expected for the iPhone to become a wallet. But the patience of Apple is slowly paying off.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple Pay spent its first years as a slow burn: Loup Ventures counted just 38M US active users back in early 2018, and even by September 2020 a survey put worldwide users at roughly half the iPhone base (507M globally). The new datapoint closes that gap at home — 75% of US iPhones activated, up from 10% in 2016 — meaning the wallet went from opt-in novelty to near-default in six years.
The acceptance side was never the bottleneck: Apple had already secured support for 90% of US credit-card purchase volume back in 2014. With Apple now claiming 90% of US retailers accept the wallet, both sides of the two-sided market — cards and terminals — are effectively saturated, which is why activation rate is the number that matters.
First-order effects
- Apple's wallet is now pre-positioned on three-quarters of US iPhones, so every new payment feature Apple layers onto the wallet reaches a near-universal installed base on day one.
- US retailers who still don't accept Apple Pay are now the outlier against a 90% acceptance norm, making non-support a visible customer-facing gap rather than a neutral choice.
Second-order effects
- With card issuance and terminal acceptance long since locked in, competition among Apple, banks, and rival wallets shifts to who owns the customer relationship inside the wallet — placement, defaults, and added services rather than raw acceptance.
- Rival phone-platform wallets face a widening activation gap on iOS specifically, pushing them to compete harder on Android share or on cross-platform features Apple doesn't control.
Third-order effects
- If activation keeps climbing toward the iPhone base itself, the wallet becomes the default permission layer through which payments, tickets, and identity pass on iPhone — a chokepoint position that historically invites regulator and merchant-fee scrutiny, though no such action appears in this coverage.
- Payments economics could re-center on whoever controls wallet distribution rather than card networks or acquirers, a structural shift whose pace depends on how fast remaining holdout users and merchants convert.
The trend: Smartphone wallets are completing their decade-long move from optional app to default payment rail, with Apple Pay's US activation curve as the clearest running measurement of that shift.