At its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose yesterday, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, announced a hot new feature in iOS 11 — peer-to-peer payments in Apple Pay.
That means that you can use the company’s contactless payment system to send and receive money from your contacts directly through the Messages app.
This feature is available as an iMessage app, and can be invoked from the new app drawer in Messages.
You’ll be able to choose from all the debit and credit cards in your Wallet, authenticate payments with TouchID, and your contact will receive the money in their Apple Pay Cash account.
They can then transfer the amount to their bank, make Apple Pay purchases, or send it to others.
Apple Pay’s new functionality will be available across iOS 11 devices, as well as Apple Watch.