Has Apple ruled out mobile payments?

The release of iOS 6 for iPhones and iPads has been greeted with the usual fanboy hysteria usually reserved for the Dear Leaders of North Korea – wailing, wild applause, tears… fear – but within it is something that could well set Apple up in role of gatekeeper to m-commerce, m-loyalty and m-payments.

Passbook is a native app that is built into the OS and is designed to take all the user’s boarding passes, tickets, store card apps, loyalty cards and eventually payments cards, wallets and so on and organises them into a single place.

The initial services it offers are around ticketing and loyalty cards and it cleverly uses the GPS to locate you and pop your ticket, boarding pass or loyalty card onto the phone’s lock screen when you are the place you need to use them.

While the app is not a full mobile payments system, like Google Wallet, as it doesn’t store credit card or bank account details, it is a step in the direction of mobile redemption behaviour and might prove to be a smart road to easing consumers past concerns over mobile payment services.

What it does do is position Apple’s OS in line to be the catch-all needed to make the burgeoning world of loyalty and ticketing on mobile simple to use and manage. But will the company ever add payments to this?

One of the biggest bugbear’s with making m-commerce work properly, is that as it becomes more widely spread and apps that help you do it proliferate, managing it all becomes a nightmare.

Mobile payments is heading in this direction as I type. There are now so many different ways to pay, that it presents a massively confused picture to users and merchants alike. I have, because its my job, downloaded many mobile wallets, loyalty cards and ticketing apps and already it is becoming very hard to manage. Much as the early days of trying to download and manage music was 10 or more years ago.

What Apple’s Passbook does is create a single point of entry and control for the user of many of the things that the phone can be used for out there in m-commerce land. And it also looks, possibly, like Apple setting up yet another throttle on a service sector, just has iTunes has done on music, movies and TV shows and Newsstand has done for publishing. Is Apple poised to turn Passbook into the tool for managing payments? Will it integrate it with iTunes and make it a fully fledged payment tool?

The jury’s out on that, but it is very surprising that Apple hasn’t made any foray into mobile payments with the launch of iOS 6. Everyone was expecting something and everyone still thinks NFC will feature in iPhone 5, but I am now not so sure.

Were mobile payments – in the sense of using your phone to pay for things in shops – a real goer, then Apple would be on board with something clever. The fact that the company isn’t makes me start to think that maybe, just maybe, mobile payments isn’t ready to go yet – and may never be.

Consumer opinion – as I have opined here before – is not really behind it, and despite a raft of launches around it over the past few months, no one is really doing mobile payments. Everyone seems happy with cards and phone being very separate. Perhaps we have a solution for a problem that doesn’t yet exist?