At the beginning of last week we reported on the new Apple Pay and how it was going to completely change the way we shop and now we’re happy to announce that Apple Pay is here through the iOS 8.1 update.
Apple Pay is Here and so Is iOS 8.1
Apple has been threatening us with Apple Pay for quite a while now, but today it finally made it available to all iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users through an operating system update. iOS 8.1 was released today and with it Apple Pay. Some more tweaks and bug fixes were included in the update.
Apple Pay is here and you can get it by downloading the new iOS 8.1. Go to your iPhone Settings, choose General and then Software Update and it will appear there. It’s about 100MB is size and it shouldn’t take longer than 10 minutes to download and install, depending on your Internet speed, of course.
Unfortunately, Apple Pay is only supported by the newest two iPhones: 6 and 6 Plus, because Apple Pay uses the dedicated secure chip and Near Field Communication connectivity to communicate with retailers.
What these two iPhone have and the rest don’t is a secure element that will store credit card data on the phone and also a device account number that is completely unique to each iPhone.
Apple Pay supports debit and credit cards from American Express, Visa and MasterCard, issued by banks including, Citi, Chase, Bank of America, Capital One and Wells Fargo which make up 83% of credit card purchase volume inside the United States.
With the new iOS 8.1 update Camera Roll is back. The feature was taken out with the introduction of iOS 8, but Apple had received so many complaints that it decided to put it back. There’s also the public beta of the iCloud Photo Library storage, where you can backup all your photos across devices that are iCloud enabled.
iOS 8.1 is available for download for iPad 2 and up, iPhone 4s and up, third gen Apple TV and 5 gen iPod Touch.