The IT Nerd

I’ve been doing testing of watchOS 5 so that I can write a detailed review of Apple’s OS for their insanely successful wearable devices. In the process of that I came across something interesting. I went to respond to a text message yesterday and found this which I promptly posted to Twitter:

I just noticed this in the Messages app on the Apple Watch. Is @apple Pay cash coming to Canada? I am investigating further. pic.twitter.com/iQRCQy60Ac

— The IT Nerd (@The_IT_Nerd) September 18, 2018

There’s a Apple Pay icon that wasn’t present before. And an erase and reinstall of watchOS 5 does nothing to make it go away. Thus I have to assume that this is one of three things:

1. This is a mistake by Apple where Apple screwed up and made this visible to Canadians. I say that because they have made this sort of mistake before. But whatever feature that they accidentally made visible disappears a few days later. That has not happened in this case (so far).
2. This is by design. As in the button is present but not active unless turned on in that country.
3. Apple Pay Cash is coming to Canada.

So far I have no indication of which of the three this is. But I am trying to dig to see if I can get some answers. For example, I tried to go to wallet on my iPhone 7 Plus running iOS 12 to see if I could activate Apple Pay Cash. But no luck there. Having said that, you can help me to figure out what is going on. If you have an Apple Watch running watchOS 5 and you are outside the US, can you tell me if you see something similar to the picture above by leaving a comment. I’d really appreciate it.

In the meantime, I live in hope that Apple Pay Cash is coming to Canada as this country is also still waiting for Apple News, and will likely be waiting for a while for the ECG function that is part of the Apple Watch Series 4. While I understand that it can take time for stuff to appear in Canada, it often takes an absurdly long time for features to appear here from an Apple perspective.

UPDATE: I have just updated my Apple Watch Series 4 to watchOS 5.1.2 and discovered this:

One thing that I noticed in watchOS 5.1.2 is that the button for Apple Pay Cash is gone. I guess that means that Apple Pay Cash is not coming to Canada. ☹️ pic.twitter.com/kMHjlSVsMg

— The IT Nerd (@The_IT_Nerd) December 6, 2018

So I guess the answer is #1 which was that this was a mistake that Apple has now fixed. This will be disappointing to Canadians for sure.

This entry was posted on September 19, 2018 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.