To go alongside its popular Square Card Reader app, Square Inc. has rebranded its Card Case app to become Pay with Square.
Whereas Square Card Reader is more about accepting payments for merchants via their smartphone, Pay with Square is focused towards consumers and hopes to pose stiff competition to other mobile payment services like Google Wallet and future offerings from PayPal.
Don Reisinger at CNET claims the app offers the same functionality as it did when just called Card Case, but the branding is simple and more understadable. The app allows people to pay for products at merchant stores that support Square without ever needing to take their credit cards out. Here’s a video of the app in action:
Users can find nearby businesses on a map, and there are a bunch of additional social features including the capability to mark your favorite businesses and share them with friends.
According to Lauren Goode at AllThingsD, only 75,000 of Square’s one million merchants allow goods to be paid for with Pay with Square, whereas Google’s Wallet is now accepted at over 140,000 merchants in the U.S.
The mobile payments market is certainly hotting up these days and just who will win out is hard to say. But with a number of choices out there, and NFC capabilities becoming standard in future smartphones, the technology is certainly here to stay.