Apple Pay, Android Pay (and perhaps Samsung Pay if tokenization is really being used)... all great advances in security and convenience for all parties involved. As with any new payment technology, there are some stumbling blocks for rollout. For me, as an early-adopter consumer, the frustrations have been with both inconsistent acceptance coupled with poorly trained cashiers. If I see the terminal facing the customer, I'll try Apple Pay, and it will often work. It's great on my Watch, as I don't even need to authenticate with a fingerprint, although the iPhone has an advantage of telling you just by holding it over the terminal (even without waking it up) if Apple Pay will be possible. The other clue I now look for is if the first LED is lit, or first circle on the LCD is filled in. That means the terminal has NFC turned on and is actively scanning.
While Discover Card was running their Apple Pay promo, which for new accounts amounted to a 22% cash back reward, I was pushing to use Apple Pay whenever and wherever I could, even if the cashier didn't know if or claimed it wouldn't work. It was surprising the places it worked including at smaller merchants. That Discover did the promo is indicative that the banks are interested in Apple Pay. It likely benefits their bottom line: improve customer convenience and reduce fraud.
For non-early-adopter users, digital wallets are either not on the radar ("Is that some new Facebook thing?") or held with suspicion along the lines of, "No way am I trusting Google/Apple/Samsung with my credit card!! That's just an invitation to getting hacked, man!" ... and think nothing of swiping their credit card at the gas pump... let alone entering their life story into the likes of Facebook for nearly anyone to harvest personal facts from, such as mother's maiden name or model of first car.
I wish Apple and Google well with ramping up use of digital wallets. They both use the same NFC standard, so success for one is success for both. The challenge I see will be consumer adoption... right now, swiping a mag-stripe credit card just works at most places. However, a crack in the user experience is Chip & Signature. The chip card readers are most merchants in the US are horribly slow, and if you pull your card out too prematurely, you're in for more delay to restart the payment transaction. Stores adopting chip readers are often now collecting more validation data from mag-stripe cards, such as CVV or last-four digits, due to the liability shift. One cashier told me the whole chip rollout has caused significant delays for both chip and mag-stripe users. She wished they hadn't turned off Apple Pay, as that was really quick and seamless (my local Home Depot).
