Apple Pay isn’t the first attempt at making NFC-based payments with mobile devices commonplace, but it’s certainly the first to gain real traction.
At its Spring Forward event today, the company revealed some stats on Apple Pay’s performance. The company says the service is now being used by over 2500 different banks, and is accepted at over 700,000 retail locations. These include a surge of fancy new NFC-enabled vending machines too.
These numbers, of course, will be bolstered by the imminent release of the Apple Watch.
Apple first announced Apple Pay during its iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event in September; it went live with the release of iOS 8.1 in October.
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Google for its part, has been working on revamping its own mobile payments strategy, likely looking to seize on Apple’s work towards making NFC payments common practice.
The company recently purchased mobile payments platform Softcard, previously owned by Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T, to bolster Google Wallet. These carriers obviously favored their own solution over Google’s, but now Google Wallet will be pre-installed on all of their Android devices instead.
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