Apple Pay Later may not arrive until next year due to ‘technical and engineering’ setbacks

Apple Pay Later may not arrive until next spring, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. As you may recall, Apple announced the buy now, pay later feature at WWDC 2022 and said, at the time, that it would arrive alongside iOS 16. Well, the latest version of the company’s mobile operating is here and Apple Pay Later is nowhere to be found.

A footnote on Apple’s website states the feature will arrive “in a future update.” As Gurman notes, other previously announced iOS 16 features that aren’t available yet are listed as coming “later this year.” Gurman believes the discrepancy is due to the fact Apple doesn’t know when Pay Later will be ready, and the feature may not arrive until iOS 16.4 ships in 2023. “I’m hearing there have been fairly significant technical and engineering challenges in rolling out the service, leading to delays,” he notes.

It’s interesting to learn Apple is encountering technical challenges implementing a Pay Later service. Based on Gurman’s previous reporting, the company has been working on such a feature for more than a year. It even went out of its way to create a subsidiary called Apple Financing to conduct credit checks and customer approvals. All those moves suggest the company sees financial services as a significant part of its future.