iPhone 6 Likely To Have Touch ID Enabled Mobile Payments From Apple And PayPal

News percolates out of Apple's Worldwide Developers
Conference (WWDC) in stages. First there is the keynote where Apple shines a light on specific features it wants to highlight. Then comes a week of sessions and labs where Apple engineers share concepts and techniques behind the new features in iOS and OS X with developers. Simultaneous with the action at WWDC itself is the scrutiny that developers worldwide apply to the beta versions of the code for the new OS’s that Apple releases after the keynote. All in all it’s a kind of sustained action leak of actual information about future Apple products .
Conference (WWDC) in stages. First there is the keynote where Apple shines a light on specific features it wants to highlight. Then comes a week of sessions and labs where Apple engineers share concepts and techniques behind the new features in iOS and OS X with developers. Simultaneous with the action at WWDC itself is the scrutiny that developers worldwide apply to the beta versions of the code for the new OS’s that Apple releases after the keynote. All in all it’s a kind of sustained action leak of actual information about future Apple products .
I emphasize “actual information” because so much of what is written about future Apple products is based on vague rumblings from the “supply chain,” an amorphous entity with its own agenda—primarily generating web traffic. So WWDC is especially refreshing for those of us who cover Apple and try to sift out the signal from the noise in all those rumors. Apple will release an unprecedented 4,000+ new APIs to developers with the release of iOS 8 and within those are the making of actual news.
One important move that was mentioned in the keynote but explored more fully in a dedicated session on Wednesday is the opening of Touch ID to third-party developers. In typical Apple fashion, Touch ID was rolled out in iOS 7 within its own walled garden. Users have been able to unlock their phones and authenticate purchases and downloads from Apple’s own stores, but that has been it. With iOS 8, this will all change.
There are many ways that third-party developers will now be able to use Touch ID in their apps. One example demonstrated in the session on Keychain and Authentication with Touch ID is when an app requires access to your photos it will now be able to place that permission behind a Touch ID authentication. These kind of steps can be used by developers to increases user confidence in the security of an app without slowing the user down with cumbersome password typing. The killer application for this feature, of course, is in the world of mobile payments . Keith Griffith of Business Insider reported on Thursday that developers from PayPal had been present at the session on Wednesday. A source at PayPal told him, ”It seems to be a fairly easy API to use, but we’re still kicking the tires.” Griffith confirmed with Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s senior director of global initiatives, that its developers had indeed been at the session.
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