The mobile payments space failed to find mainstream success in 2015

Last year, mobile payments managed to gain momentum, but failed to become mainstream. Several companies, including Apple, Google, and Samsung, introduced new mobile payments services in 2015, but interest among consumers has been somewhat limited. Indeed, these consumers opted to use an existing platform provided by PayPal to spend their money on their mobile devices. While mobile payments may not have gone mainstream in 2015, this could change this year, as new services become available and companies begin offering better benefits to consumers.

Many consumers remain concerned about the security of mobile payments

One of the reasons that consumers have been avoiding mobile payments is because they are not convinced of its overall security. In the past few years, major retailers have reported major data breaches, which lead to the financial information of consumers being compromised. This has sown fear among consumers, who believe that mobile payments services may be exposed to exploitation. As such, they have shied away from services, despite the availability of new technology that ensures the protection of consumer information.

Consumers want to see more value from the services that they use

Another problem that consumers have with mobile payments is that they do not see the benefit that services offer. While many services also function as a type of digital wallet, they do not consider the ability to store financial information valuable. Being able to take advantage of special deals being offered by retailers has added more attraction to certain mobile payments services, but consumers want more out of the products that they are using.

Supporting loyalty programs and improving security features may ensure the mainstream success of mobile payments

Companies involved in mobile payments may need to ensure that their services offer a worthwhile experience while also being able to keep consumer information safe. These companies will also have to show more support for loyalty programs, which have become quite popular among consumers. In doing so, these companies may be able to find more success in the mobile payments space in 2016.

Reports have been made that the social network deliberately sabotaged its own application to test user loyalty.

Facebook has now been accused of deliberately crashing its own mobile app as a part of a test of its user patience and loyalty so they can better understand how dedicated people are to the social network.

This isn’t the first time the social media platform has been involved in psychological testing of its users.

The accusation came in the form of a report published in The Information entitled “Facebook’s Android Contingency Planning.” The report stated that the social network was “testing how addicted Android phone users are to Facebook apps and making sure they can quickly download them directly from Facebook rather than through Google Play.” The publication said their source was an individual who was familiar with that specific experiment.

The suggestion in the report was that plans were being made in case the mobile app was taken down from Google Play.

Within the report, it said that “artificial errors” were deliberately introduced into the smartphone application which would cause it to crash “for hours at a time.” It claimed that the reason the test was being conducted was in order to “prepar[e] for the eventuality that it leaves the Google Play app store.”

As a part of this, the social network deliberately crashed their mobile application for some of its users, off-and-on, over a span of a number of weeks. The goal was to measure whether or not those individuals would prefer to visit the mobile website or whether they would simply give up on using Facebook. What they found was that users were, indeed, willing to use the mobile site instead of abandoning their use of that social network.

Allegedly, this entire psychological experiment on Facebook users was to find out whether or not users were addicted enough to the social network that they would continue to use the platform even if the mobile app were to face difficulties or even be removed from the Google Play Store. At the time of the writing of this article, Facebook had not yet made any official statements with regards to this accusation.