We all saw the keynote that announced that P2P money transfers are coming to Apple Pay in iOS11. They are using their "Virtual Cash Card" backed by Green Dot, to allow money transfers directly between persons. If sourced by bank account, they are Free. If sourced by Credit Card, they are 3%.
Source: https://www.recode.net/2017/6/5/15741636/apple-pay-p2p-venmo-competitor-apple-pay-cash-money-transfer
WWDC Session: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/714/ (Has nothing on P2P accessible in APIs and I could not find a WWDC video for P2P APIs).
Since they did not mention anything about an API for either iMessage or for iOS for the P2P stuff... Does anyone know whether P2P transfers will be part of the Apple Pay API in the Fall of 2017. Anyone have leads on the technical details of the API implementation for this?
I basically want to know whether they will only allow P2P in iOS through their own apps, or can you add your own features to P2P transfers either via iMessage or through CocoaTouch libraries?
Thanks in advance.
Let's break that down a bit.
Since they did not mention anything about an API for either iMessage or for iOS for the P2P stuff... Does anyone know whether P2P transfers will be part of the Apple Pay API in the Fall of 2017.
If they didn't mention it and didn't advertise it, it means - no, it's not available now and it probably won't be available this year.
Anyone have leads on the technical details of the API implementation for this?
I believe I know just the right guys you might be looking for. They're employees at Apple Inc. Unfortunately, they signed a shitload of NDAs and will never ever talk about any future software or hardware releases in public.
I basically want to know whether they will only allow P2P in iOS through their own apps, or can you add your own features to P2P transfers either via iMessage or through CocoaTouch libraries?
No luck here as well. You'd have to roll your own P2P solution for this.
What you could do, if you had a lot of free time is come and analyse iOS runtime headers for any clues for upcoming releases, but honestly, it's useless.
I have a personal story about this and how things work in iOS world. iPhone 6 came out in 2014 with NFC chip and many people hoped that Apple would make a public API for using it. It never happened with the release of iPhone 6s. It never happened with the release of iPhone 7.
Apple only released a very limited CoreNFC API on this year's WWDC conference and it's not the thing most developers hoped for.
So what it means? When it comes to new tech API support, never expect Apple to release it immediately.