Apple Said to Eye Grocery Delivery for Apple Pay

Apple may be seeing new updates for Apple Fitness+ and Apple Pay, and the company is also reportedly looking into a grocery ordering service focusing on nutrition, according to a report Sunday (May 8) from Apple Insider.

Mark Gurman, a Bloomberg reporter who often writes about Apple products, said in his “Power On” newsletter that the company might also offer an iPhone hardware subscription and a buy now, pay later (BNPL) financing program for Apple Pay.

These things could help put iPhone purchases on par with paying for other Apple subscriptions. The report said hardware subscriptions might be planned for later this year, though they could be pushed into 2023.

Additionally, another way for Apple to get ahead is to become a rival to Instacart with a new delivery service for groceries. The Apple version might come with a nutrition tracking element not seen in other versions, which might be able to integrate with the Health app and add nutritional data directly.

Apple could also be looking at adding more Apple Fitness+ workout types, though the report noted there’s no indication on what they might be at this time.

Last week, PYMNTS wrote that Apple joined Google and Microsoft to support a passwordless sign-in standard made by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium.

Read more: Apple, Google, Microsoft Expand Support of Passwordless Sign-Ins

One of the big security issues online is password-only authentication, as people have trouble keeping up with many different passwords and thus use the same ones over and over again. However, reusing passwords is a bad idea because it can lead to easy account takeovers and stolen identities.

Andrew Shikiar, the FIDO Alliance’s executive director and chief marketing officer, said the FIDO Alliance’s guiding principle has been “simpler, stronger authentication.”

“This new capability stands to usher in a new wave of low-friction FIDO implementations alongside the ongoing and growing utilization of security keys — giving service providers a full range of options for deploying modern, phishing-resistant authentication,” Shikiar said.