The Apple Beat: Why Apple Pay is sending shockwaves through the payments industry

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

 Apple Pay is actually a very big deal. More than just enabling mobile payments in a handful of partner retailers, the entire system is designed to ‘just work’ once the switch is flipped. Apple Pay will hope to become as prevalent a payment option as Visa, MasterCard or any debit card that people are already using. 

The first public Apple Pay transaction is still a few weeks away from happening, but news that Apple’s solution to mobile payments is coming, is sending shockwaves through the payments sector.

A key feature of the new iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch, Apple Pay has the backing of major credit card companies, over 800 million ready-to-go credit cards on iTunes, various debit cards plus 220,000 retailers and businesses have already signed up or, at the very least, already have the necessary infrastructure to accept Apple Pay without any large investment in hardware or training.

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HealthKit Apps reemerge on Apple App Store

Following the bugs plaguing iOS 8.0.1, Apple has stuck to their word and brought back the HealthKit apps to the App Store following the release of iOS 8.0.2. These were taken down initially because of the aforementioned bugs and they promised to bring the apps back by the end of September. So, all iOS 8 users can now go back and download the HealthKit app of their choice.

Source: Ubergizmo

Skype gets iOS 8-ready, adds interactive notifications support

Microsoft has update its Skype messenger to take more advantage of the new interactive notifications feature on iOS 8. It is now possible to respond to text messages as well as video and voice calls from the notifications settings.

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iOS 8 adoption reportedly at 30% over the weekend

iOS 8's adoption hasn't been as huge as iOS 7 a year ago (50 %) but it is still quite impressive. Cumulative findings from analytics firms firms Fiksu, Mixpanel, Appsee, & Chitika are showing tht 30% of users have updated to iOS 8 in the past three days. iOS 8 is the most signifcant update to Apple's mobile operating system and that brings a lot of user interoperability with its Mac OS X desktop.

Source: 9to5Mac