Jockeying for position on the Apple Pay Wallet

Jockeying for position on the Apple Pay Wallet

Welcome to the 7th edition of our Apple Watch Insider’s report! This week, we polled our “Inner Circle” of Apple Watch owners during the June 10th- June 17th period and the survey was completed by 200 of you!

This makes us (as far as we know) the largest independant research pool for the Apple Watch in the World!!!

Please continue to share this report and feel free to ask your friends and colleagues who have the Watch to also participate by simply signing-up at www.wristly.co

What have we learned this week?

“Glances” -- the New HomeScreen?

Only about a quarter of you have turned on more than 10 “Glances” in your Apple Watch setup. This confirms that to gain the right  to become one of the few will be a very important way to measure the actual usage-value of a new Watch app.

Only the very best application will make it there and by analog to the iPhone, Glances is probably best understood as the “HomeScreen” of the Watch!

“Activity” & “Messages” Are Your Favorites Apps!

It’s pretty obvious from the survey results that Activity and Messages are the native apps that you like best. To put numbers to it, 27% indicated that Activity is your favorite closely followed by Messages with 21%.  

After that, preferences drop off pretty quickly with Siri and Passbook taking 7% each and if including Workout - the top 5 preferred Apple native apps total 80% of the votes! Several apps including “Photos” got no vote. Even Apple has some work to do there :)

Digital Touch – The Big Surprise "Looser"!

We asked you about how you were using your Watch, relative to the expectations you had before you received it. A key result is that you are using Apple’s Digital Touch function considerably less than you initially expected. For those of you who don’t know, Digital Touch allows Watch owners to communicate by sending a tap, sketch or their heartbeat directly to another Watch.

This finding validates what we were hearing anecdotally from Watch owners we know before we asked our Intelligence Panel the question.

Why Is this Important?

When Apple introduced the Watch at its September 2014 event, Kevin Lynch, Apple’s Vice President of Technology, made a big deal out of Digital Touch. Wearable technology in general, and the Apple Watch in particular, was meant to usher in a new way of communicating, in Mr. Lynch’s words “richer live communication”. Well so far, it hasn’t.

Why are Watch Owners Using Digital Touch less than they expected?

We can think of three possible reasons.

• Digital Touch is not sufficiently compelling and is more of a gimmick at least for now
• There simply aren’t enough pairs of Watch owners around yet who feel comfortable communicating with Digital Touch. Sending someone your heartbeat, drawing her a picture, or gently tapping him on the wrist is a highly personal form of communication.
• The Watch hasn’t yet penetrated the consumer market segment that will take communication via Digital Touch to heart and lead the rest of us to adopt it. Think how SMS was adopted in Western Europe first by the GenX teens?

You also told us that you are using Siri and Voice-to-Text a lot more that you were expecting. 65% of you fell in to this category. This is probably a direct result of your preference to use your Watches for Messaging and the most convenient method of inputting text into the Watch, given its lack of a keyboard, is to speak to it.

We asked you to comment on other aspects of the Watch that you were either using more or less than you expected. One comment that we saw multiple times was that you are using third party apps less than you expected. This also confirms again that many of you are disappointed with third party apps and the way they work on the Watch.

Apple Pay – Mega High Adoption Rates

Of the 126 of you that are in the US, 87% of you have set up Apple Pay. According to a March 2015 survey by PYMNTS.com and  InfoScout, among the wider population of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners, 85% haven’t used Apple Pay. That’s a huge difference and says much about the nature of Apple Watch owners and your willingness to be on the cutting edge.

In addition to setting up Apple Pay, you are using it too. Of the 126 US respondents who have access to Apple Pay on the watch, 110 have set it up and just over 65% of you use it either daily or weekly. Remember, this is against a wider population of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners, of whom only 15% have set up Apple Pay.

Pay A Catalyst for Change?

With the majority of users only setting up 1 or 2 cards, this piece of insight has the most potential consequences for the Finances and credit-card/payment industry.

Consumers for now don’t load too many cards into their Apple Pay “Wallet” - jockeying for position seems to be an absolute must for all major providers. Next time we will ask/contrast to the number of credit and debit cards in one’s physical wallet.

We hope you enjoyed disovering this Apple Watch insights. For more info on Wristly and to participate in future research simply visit www.Wristly.co

Written by  Bernard Desarnauts