Apple Pay Later probably won’t appear until next spring at the earliest, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Previously, Apple announced the “buy now, pay later” feature at WWDC 2022 and said it would come with iOS 16. However, the operating system version is already out, and Apple Pay Later is nowhere to be found.
Apple’s website says the feature will appear “in a future update.” According to Gurman, other previously announced iOS 16 features not yet available are listed as appearing “later this year.” Gurman thinks the discrepancy stems from the fact that Apple doesn’t know when Pay Later will be ready, and the feature may not appear until iOS 16.4 in 2023.
“I’m hearing there have been fairly significant technical and engineering challenges in rolling out the service, leading to delays,” he notes.
Judging by Gurman’s previous reports, the company has been working on such a feature for more than a year. It even went so far as to create a subsidiary called Apple Financing to conduct credit checks and customer approvals. These moves suggest that the company sees financial services as essential to its future.
