How do I send money with Apple Pay Cash?

Sounds like a good strategy and Apple just launched Apple Pay Cash so your timing is very good. There are two small hiccups, however: The little problem is that you can only send dollar amounts over $1.00 so if you owe someone $0.75 that’ll have to be sent as $1.00, a significant 25% surcharge. More seriously, the bigger issue is that both the sender and recipient have to already be set up with Apple Pay, so if they’re using an Android phone or an iPhone but have no payment system setup you’ll see an error message rather than the send window.

There’s also the curious puzzle of where does the money actually go which I haven’t quite been able to figure out yet. It appears that Apple Pay Cash lives in its own little world and so when people send you money it just sits in your APC (Apple Pay Cash, of course) account until you send it to someone else. To start you need to hook up a credit card (which incurs fees) or a debit card, but once the money’s in the system, it seems rather stuck there.

Still, for your situation it’ll probably work great because it sounds like you all keep handing each other the same few dollars anyway, assuming that it’s spread evenly and there’s no deadbeat in the group!

Let me show you how I sent my friend Marvin a buck and he then sent that same dollar back to me. To start, remember that the entire transaction takes place within iMessage [Messages] on your iOS device. Go to Messages on your Mac and you can see the transaction that’s occurred, but you can’t initiate or receive payments directly. Yet.

At this initial point, there’s certainly no clue how to get to APC, that’s for sure:

But the “>” button just to the left of the input window is where all the action really happens for Apple Messages! Tap on it and a few buttons show up instead:

The “A” app button is the one you want to choose and it reveals a whole world of features and capabilities in the program that most people don’t know even exists! The apps all show up along the very bottom and a single tap on the Apple Pay button produces a bit, easy to use payment widget in the middle of your message screen:

If you have a few minutes, do explore the different apps here – there are some really cool ones. And you don’t have the shrieking monkey? That’s the animoji app and it’s only available on the iPhone X at this point. FYI.

Back to Apple Pay Cash, however. Let’s say that you do want to pay exactly $1.00 and are ready to proceed. You can also tap on the amount and then specify cents to get to, say, $2.75, but it won’t let you send less than $1.00 at this time.

Ready to proceed? Tap on “Pay” to send the cash.

Well, almost. First time through you’ll need to set things up…

Yeah, you already know you’re setting up Apple Pay Cash, so not sure why this window pops up, but… whatev’s. Tap on “Continue”.

You can also add a credit card if your debit cards won’t work: none of mine work with Apple Pay, as it happens. Still, using a credit card as the source of the money you’re sending does incur a transaction fee which doesn’t happen if you have a debit card setup instead.

Finally, though, you’re ready to actually use Apple Pay Cash, as is obvious when you get back to the point where you can actually send something:

Looks good. A tap on the (now black) send arrow and…

Ah, there is a confirmation step. A relief when otherwise a friend could grab your phone and send themselves $500 or something crazy! A double-click to confirm payment and it’s sent.

Notice that there’s a 3% transaction fee due to me using a credit card here, so it’s costing me $1.03 to send Marvin $1.00. Not too bad. Once he receives and accepts the payment I’ll get a brief confirmation notification:

He’s feeling generous, so he immediately returns the favor by sending me back that $1.00. I see this in Messages:

Interestingly, I didn’t have to confirm receipt; as soon as he sent it the transaction completed and it was in my APC balance. My theory: You have to confirm and accept the very first payment transaction because of the setup required, but once you’ve done that, the money can flow freely between you and your friends and family. Pretty cool, really.

Want to learn more about Apple Pay Cash? Apple has a page with lots of info: All About Apple Pay Cash.