One-click payments have become a cornerstone of modern mobile commerce, but early smartphone platforms faced significant hurdles in delivering seamless payment experiences. As mobile applications gained popularity, developers quickly realized that lengthy checkout processes—particularly those requiring users to repeatedly enter email addresses, passwords, and payment information—created friction that reduced purchases and discouraged app engagement. While Apple’s ecosystem benefited from a tightly integrated payment infrastructure through iTunes, Android developers initially lacked a similarly streamlined native payment experience.
This gap presented both a challenge and an opportunity. Payment providers recognized that simplifying in-app purchases could accelerate Android application adoption while expanding their own user bases. Companies such as PayPal, Zong, and other alternative payment providers sought to make payments virtually invisible to consumers by reducing authentication steps and enabling faster transactions. For developers, easier payment integration meant higher conversion rates and greater incentives to build for the Android platform. As smartphones became an increasingly important commerce channel, frictionless payments emerged as a critical competitive advantage for operating systems, payment providers, and application developers alike.
Entering long email addresses and passwords on a smartphone is a pain.
What you want is one-click payments.
Apple’s iPhone offers developers that facility with smooth connections into the iTunes payment method.
Android-based phones have no such native facility.
Google Checkout is based on email and password entry and that’s too clunky.
Rumor has it that PayPal is coming to the rescue and that would be a great play for the payment services provider.
The Android OS is on a lot of smartphones and could help grow PayPal’s base.
Other providers, as this article details, are looking to provide their own alternatives.
It’s an important addition to Android capability because if developers find it hard to get paid for their work, Android won’t get the traction it should. Since Google’s business model is primarily from search, what’s wrong with having PayPal provide the payments capability?
To make it easier for consumers to make payments via Android handsets, a small group of companies last week introduced technology that would bypass the payment methods Google has approved. Zong, a mobile-payments company, says it joined two other payment firms, Billing Revolution and AdKnowledge, to offer payment options for PapayaMobile, a Beijing-based developer of social networking and gaming applications, to offer software developers a set of payment options they can easily add to Android applications.
Numerous programmers lament the difficulty of building payments systems for Android. “Payments are a big problem on Android,” says Sam Altman, chief executive officer of Loopt, a location-based social network that runs on several wireless phones. “It’s not the biggest problem, but when you consider how you’re going to spend your time and resources, it’s certainly something you have to consider.” And the more difficult it is to get paid for products or delivered via mobile apps, the less incentive some programmers have to write for Android.
The evolution of mobile payments demonstrates that convenience is often one of the strongest drivers of consumer adoption. Reducing checkout friction through one-click payments not only improves the customer experience but also increases purchase completion rates, benefiting both developers and payment providers. As Android matured, the availability of streamlined payment options became increasingly important for supporting a thriving application ecosystem and encouraging continued innovation.
Today, frictionless payment experiences are an expected feature of nearly every major mobile platform. Secure tokenization, biometric authentication, digital wallets, and embedded payment services have largely replaced the cumbersome login processes that once slowed mobile commerce. The early push to simplify Android payments highlighted an enduring lesson for the payments industry: the easier it is for consumers to complete a purchase securely, the more successful mobile commerce platforms and application ecosystems are likely to become.
Read full article: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2010/tc20101022_964044.htm
