Oh the irony. Google may have beat Apple in launching a mobile wallet ecosystem, but Apple iPhone users are more enthusiastic about making payments through their mobile phones than their Android counterparts, according to a new report.
In the latest Pulse study from Retrevo, an electronics e-commerce site, 40 percent of iPhone users and only 24 percent of Android users said they wanted to be able to pay in a store with their cell phones. Concurrently, 44 percent of Android users said they were "not interested" in a mobile wallet, while 35 percent of iPhone users agreed with the statement.
"IPhone owners as a populous tend to be more, shall we say, in-tune with their mobile devices," said Jennifer Jacobsen, PR director of Retrevo. "If there's a new trend in mobile tech and what you can do with a smartphone, iPhone owners seem more ready to try it than other cell phone users."
When it comes to choosing from the vast offering of indiscernible "mobile wallet" services being advertised these days, the study found that users trust their phone companies more than their credit card companies.
Thirty-six percent of all smartphone users said they'd trust a Google mobile wallet, versus 33 percent for Apple, 32 percent from a major credit card, and only 26 percent from their cell phone carrier.
At the same time, 79 percent of the 1,000 people surveyed were completely uninterested in mobile wallets or didn't know what a mobile wallet was.
The findings of these reports casts some doubt over the innumerable efforts to kickstart the mobile payments industry, which is estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and has led to numerous alliances and mobile platforms: Isis, a carrier-led coalition of Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile; Google Wallet, a Google-led initiative debuting with Citi, MasterCard, and Sprint; Square, a mobile card reader launched by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey; and mobile wallets from MasterCard, American Express, and Visa. Apple is also rumored to be working on an NFC-based smartphone.
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