Apple has expanded Tap to Pay on iPhone to Malaysia, its latest push to turn the iPhone itself into a merchant payment terminal. The launch, announced on 22 April 2026, pushes the feature past 50 countries worldwide.
For the Kenyan market, the news is worth paying attention to. Not because Kenya is next in line, but because it is not.
What Tap to Pay on iPhone actually is
Tap to Pay turns a merchant’s iPhone into the card reader. A shop owner opens a supported payment app (Apple has named ADAPTIS, Fiuu, HitPay, Stripe, and Zoho as the first five in Malaysia), keys in the amount, and hands the iPhone to the customer. The customer taps a contactless Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, UnionPay, or MyDebit card on the phone. They can also tap another iPhone, an Apple Watch, or an Android phone with Google Pay. The NFC chip on the merchant’s device reads the payment, and the transaction settles through the payment app.
It needs an iPhone 11 or later running the latest iOS. No external hardware, no Bluetooth reader, no separate terminal. For the customer, it looks and feels exactly like tapping a normal POS.
Privacy works the same way Apple Pay does. Transactions are processed through the iPhone’s Secure Element chip. Apple says it does not store card numbers, does not know what is being bought, and does not know who is buying. Card data never touches Apple’s servers.
Why Malaysia, and why now
Malaysia is the latest piece in Apple’s Southeast Asia push. Singapore and Hong Kong already have the feature. Apple Pay itself has been live in Malaysia since 2022, through banks like AmBank, HSBC, and Maybank. The country has a dense contactless card base, mature local payment rails (MyDebit, DuitNow), and a growing pool of payment service providers willing to integrate. Apple also has a physical retail store there, Apple The Exchange TRX, which will start accepting Tap to Pay at checkout.
In short, Apple moves into markets where the card rails, the regulators, and the fintech partners already line up. Malaysia ticked all three boxes.
Why Kenya is still off the list
Kenya is not on Apple’s Tap to Pay list, and the reason is structural. Apple Pay itself is not live in Kenya. Only two African countries, South Africa and Morocco, currently support Apple Pay. Without Apple Pay as the base layer, Tap to Pay has nothing to plug into locally.
There are deeper reasons. M-Pesa, not cards, is the dominant rail. Safaricom is rolling out its own M-Pesa Tap-to-Pay, but only on Android, because Apple has historically locked the iPhone’s NFC chip to Apple Pay. iOS users in Kenya are still stuck scanning QR codes or typing till numbers.
Card volumes in Kenya are not small. Card transactions hit roughly KES 538.5 billion in 2024 per the Central Bank of Kenya. That is the pool Tap to Pay would eat into the day it arrives.
The TouristTap bridge
The most interesting bridge to a Kenyan launch is already running. TouristTap, the Craft Silicon app recently endorsed by the government, effectively delivers a Kenyan version of what Apple has just rolled out in Malaysia. A visitor lands, links their Visa or Mastercard to the app, taps to pay at a till, paybill, or mobile number, and the merchant is paid in KES. It uses NFC, PIN-on-Glass, and routes through KCB and Visa’s CyberSource. The country’s roughly KES 500 billion tourism sector is the target.
If Apple Pay ever lands in Kenya, TouristTap becomes an obvious partner rather than a competitor. The infrastructure, the certifications, and the merchant network are already in place. What is missing is the piece only Apple can ship: bank partnerships with local issuers.
The takeaway
Malaysia getting Tap to Pay is a reminder of how far Apple’s merchant payments story has stretched, and how quietly Kenya has been left out. The tech works, the demand exists, and a local product has already proven the appetite on the tourism side. The ball is with Apple, and with the Kenyan banks that would have to sign up to make Apple Pay local first.
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