Developers have long used PayPal’s Mobile Payment Libraries to develop in-app mobile payment functionality.
But yesterday PayPal quietly completed the rebranding and relaunch of Mobile Payment Libraries as Mobile SDK with the introduction of SDK for Android. (IOS Mobile SDK was introduced last March.) Mobile SDK, apparently, is expected to better sell PayPal as a payments provider for web/mobile developers. In other words, look out Stripe.
With Mobile SDK, PayPal adds the following additional functionality:
- Developers can accept both PayPal and credit/debit cards, with the option for cards to be scanned using card.io technology;
- “Seamless,” in-app payments experience; and
- “Easier” to integrate
Whether it is actually easier to integrate, for example, is difficult for us to tell. However, the change is a sign that PayPal is taking notice of the developer space, and putting more of its oomph behind it, including selling its vast network of users. For example, PayPal argues that Mobile SDK gives developers “a payments solution that scales with them as they grow.” PayPal says it connects more than 128 million account holders across more than 50 financial networks in 190 markets and in 25 currencies around the globe. Or, put another way, that’s a lot of connections.
Get more details at www.developer.paypal.com.