iPhone Owners More Enthusiastic about Mobile Wallet

June 22, 2011

iPhone owners are more enthusiastic about near field communications (NFC)-enabled “mobile wallet” technology than owners of Android phones, according to June 2011 data from Retrevo. Forty percent of iPhone owners are waiting for mobile wallet compatibility in the next cell phone they buy, making them about 67% more likely than Android phone owners (24%) to say so.

iPhone Owners More Aware of Mobile Wallet

Thirty-two percent of Android phone owners are not aware of mobile wallet technology, 28% more than the 25% of iPhone owners who are unaware. As would be expected considering other survey results, 44% of Android phone owners are not interested in a phone with mobile wallet, 26% more than the 35% of iPhone owners who are not interested.

6 in 10 iPhone Owners Would Trust Apple Mobile Wallet

Apple has not yet introduced mobile wallet functionality in any of its smartphones. However, six in 10 (61%) iPhone owners would trust Apple to provide a mobile wallet. This figure is more than double the 27% of Android phone owners who would trust Apple and 85% more than the 33% of all cell phone owners who would trust Apple.

Perhaps because Google has already announced it will run mobile wallet pilots in New York and San Francisco this summer, there is no significant difference between trust in Google among Android phone (46%) and iPhone (45%) owners. However, both these figures are roughly 25% higher than the 36% of all cell phone owners who would trust Google.

It is worth noting that cell phone carriers have trust levels generally much lower than any other potential source of mobile wallet functionality, including major credit card companies.

1 in 5 Consumers Wants Mobile Wallet

Only around one in five (21%) of consumers would like to buy things with a mobile wallet and are waiting for that capability to be in their next cell phone. Unfortunately for mobile wallet providers, the overwhelming majority (79%) of consumers in this study are either not interested in mobile wallets or don’t know what a mobile wallet is.

Younger, Male Consumers More Interested

Interest in mobile wallets divides along generational lines, with 28% of 18-to-35-year-olds expressing much stronger interest in NFC than the large majority (75%) of consumers 50 and older who don’t want anything to do with it. Men appear to be more interested in buying things (27%) with their phones as women (15%), with nearly twice as many men as women indicating they would like to be able to buy things with their cell phones.

Juniper: N. America, W. Europe to Dominate NFC Smartphones

North America and Western Europe will be the two dominant players in the global near field communications (NFC) smartphone market in 2014, according to an April 2011 white paper from Juniper Research. “Hitting the N-Mark in NFC” predicts the NFC smartphone market will approach 300 million devices by that time.

About the Data: The data for this report came from a study of online individuals in the US conducted exclusively for Retrevo in June 2011 by an independent panel. The sample size was more than 1,000 distributed across gender, age, income and location.