Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. Apple
  4. Wearables
  5. Legacy Archives

PayPal was going to partner with Apple Pay, but then it cozied up to Samsung

By
Add as a preferred source on Google

Hell hath no fury like Apple scorned. Apple and Paypal were reportedly in talks to add PayPal as a preferred partner to Apple Pay, but then eBay’s CEO John Donahoe aligned PayPal with Samsung instead. Just as PayPal’s former president David Marcus predicted, Apple immediately shut PayPal out of Apple Pay indefinitely. Now, PayPal is one of the only big players in the mobile payment space that isn’t a part of Apple Pay.

Sources familiar with the negotiations between Apple and PayPal told Bank Innovation that PayPal was among the first companies Cupertino contacted when it began work on Apple Pay. Apparently, the two companies were close to working out a deal and even perhaps establishing a preferred partnership, when eBay’s Donahoe pushed PayPal into a deal with Samsung. PayPal’s Marcus was said to be against the deal because he feared it would damage the company’s relationship with Apple.

Recommended Videos

Needless to say, his advice was ignored and PayPal joined forces with Apple’s known rival, Samsung on the company’s fingerprint scanner for the Galaxy S5 smartphone. One source told the publication that as soon as Apple got wind of the deal, it  “kicked them out of the door.” Marcus later left PayPal for Facebook and now eBay says it will spin Paypal off into a separate company.

Ever since Apple Pay was unveiled in September, PayPal has been aggressively campaigning against the new mobile payments service. It recently launched an ad campaign, in which it said PayPal stands for the people who “want our money safer than our selfies.” The ad refers to the Apple iCloud scandal in which nude photos of prominent celebrities leaked all over the Internet.

Malarie Gokey
Malarie Gokey
Former Mobile Editor
As DT's Mobile Editor, Malarie runs the Mobile and Wearables sections, which cover smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and…
Topics
Snapchat Planets: What’s the order, and what do they mean?
Snapchat Planets turns your best friends list into a solar system, and yes, your orbit says a lot
Snapchat Planets being shown on the Snapchat app on iPhone.

Snapchat is already packed with little symbols that can be weirdly hard to decode. You have streaks, emojis, badges, scores, Best Friends, and if you use Snapchat Plus, a tiny solar system that shows where you sit in someone’s closest-friends list.

The feature is called Friend Solar System, though most people just call it Snapchat Planets. It takes your position in a friend’s Snapchat orbit and turns it into a planet. From Mercury to Neptune, these celestial bodies signify how close a person is to you.

Read more
How to use WhatsApp Web
We'll show you how to use WhatsApp on your desktop or laptop
WhatsApp Web

As one of the most popular messaging services, you’ve already heard of WhatsApp. From its humble beginnings in 2009—two years before Apple introduced iMessage—to its acquisition by Facebook (now Meta) in 2014, WhatsApp has become the dominant messaging platform around the globe.

In recent years, it's grown even more potent with new features like video messages, self-destructing voice messages, the ability to edit sent messages, and more. We even finally got an WhatsApp iPad app in May 2025.

Read more
What is WhatsApp? How to use the app, tips, tricks, and more
From setting it up to mastering hidden features, here is your complete guide to WhatsApp.
WhatsApp app store listing open on iPhone

There's no shortage of messaging apps out there. The past decade has given us more options than we know what to do with, largely because smartphones demanded something better than plain old SMS.

Both the App Store and the Play Store are packed with apps that promise to revolutionize the way we communicate. Most of them didn't make it. The truth is, a messaging app is only as good as the number of people using it, and most apps never cross that threshold.

Read more