Apple Teams With Bird Scooters, Bonobos

To reduce friction for mobile payments for purchases such as scooter rides and clothing, Apple is teaming up with partners such as Bird scooters and the Bonobos clothing store. With the new function, special tags can trigger purchases with Apple Pay without the need for a special app, 9 to 5 Mac reported.

iPhones will be able to read a near-field communication (NFC) tag that is specially encoded to display an interface for an Apple Pay purchase when someone holds a device near it. This does not require any third-party apps or additional setups.

With Bird, for instance, customers currently have to download the company’s app and find a nearby scooter before scanning a quick-response (QR) code. But with the new implementation, customers can simply tap their phones and begin their trips.

As TechTimes observes, “These days, finding and renting a Bird scooter isn’t that difficult, which is why both Bird and Apple see this as an opportunity to make the experience near frictionless for iPhone users.”

In other recent Apple Pay news, Uber announced in mid-April that it was adding Apple Pay to its popular Uber Eats app, per reports. Users who wanted to tap into the payment option could do so using Touch ID or Face ID inside the app for Uber Eats. While Apple Pay has previously been a payment option for the Uber ride-hailing app, the addition to the food app was new. Uber Eats was to launch Apple Pay to nearly 20 markets, including the U.S., the U.K., Belgium, Sweden and New Zealand, among others.

Apple Pay already functions in numerous apps such as Lyft, Etsy, Instacart and Staples. Postmates, Starbucks, Grubhub, Seamless and Panera also reportedly accept Apple Pay.