Apple Pay Express Transit is slowly making its way to the Hexagon. iMore says Île-de-France Mobilités, the regional authority over transport in France, has announced plans to test Apple’s easy to use transit pay functionality for Apple Wallet on iPhone and Apple Watch this year.
For those not familiar with Apple Pay Express Transit, iMore says the feature “allows people to make transit payments without the need to authenticate via Face ID, Touch ID, or passcode.” It also lets users pay without touching dirty, filthy money which was neat when you could do it before the pandemic.
iMore says the service is coming to French transport “soon.” Indications are that there will be a testing phase this year, followed by a partial rollout in 2023 - going wider in 2024. To me, that does not sound like “soon.” Then again, Paris is a two-thousand-year-old city, so a couple of years is really not that long by local standards.
