Though Apple Pay got a lot of attention when it launched, it has had a hard time so far holding on to all that consumer interest. In fact, as PYMNTS and InfoScout’s reports on Apple Pay adoption have indicated time and time again, while consumers like Apple Pay just fine when they remember to use it, more often than not they are either forgetting or shopping totally unaware that they are in a store that would accept Apple Pay.
A new app on the market indicates that might be changing.
Pay Finders helps users locate merchants who accept Apple Pay through a crowdsourced interactive map of businesses. The app found two interesting things in recent days.
The first is that 12,673 new merchants in North America (95 percent of them being small businesses) have recently added Apple Pay. In parallel, its developer reported that the new app’s users have increased an incredible 750 percent over the past two days. That either indicates a big sudden spike upward, or the fact that the brand new app had a teeny-tiny user base that is growing quickly (though increasing a small number by 750 percent may still well leave one with a small number).
Brian Roemmele, creator of the Pay Finders app, noted the jump on Twitter.
“Christmas was good to the iPhone 6 series and Apple Pay adoption,” he said.
On Christmas Day, Roemmele had earlier noted that “indirect activation data suggested that the Target and Best Buy $100 off Apple Watch promotion may have ‘doubled [the number of Apple Watch] devices in use.'”
Apple has also added Apple Pay badges to the detail pages of a number of select merchants in its own Maps app, but those badges are capturing mostly large chains as opposed to small merchants that have also made the upgrade.
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