So I was visiting with my girlfriend this afternoon, and her iPhone sounded a text alert. On her screen was the message “Frances (not her real name) cannot receive funds through Apple Pay at this time.” I scrolled through her list of incoming texts to try to learn more, and the message went away, and I was not able to recover it or find it in her list of archived tests. But if I’m remembering correctly, the name at the top of the text was “Frances (not her real name).”
The thing is, Frances (not her real name) is my girlfriend’s cleaning woman (actually her real job). And my girlfriend not only has never paid her through Apple Pay, she doesn’t even have Apple Pay set up. It happens to be the case that the cleaning woman can’t receive funds through Apple Pay (she informed us of this when she showed up to work forty-five minutes later), but why would anyone feel it would benefit my girlfriend to know this, especially given the act that she cannot disburse funds through Apple Pay at this time?
It’s very odd. I tried to google some enlightenment on the subject this evening, but I haven’t had any luck.
Any Dopers have any ideas? TIA.
This is a guess:
{
There may be some functionality in iOS / iPadOS to detect when a SMS talks about payment, so that they can conveniently offer a “Pay with Apple Pay” option. Your girlfriend may have been exchanging messages with Frances about money (billing, etc.). The message you saw was then telling you that Apple detected that money was involved in a conversation, that they would have liked to show you the convenient “Pay with Apple Pay” button, but that it wouldn’t work for paying Frances.
}
Guess #2 : Same thing, but with Siri detecting a conversation about paying 100 bucks to Frances.
Thanks. That sounds plausible, if a little goddamned presumptuous/intrusive of whoever would write such an algorithm
The fact that the text disappeared sounds to me like it was Spam. I don’t know how iOS works but on Android it’s got an automatic spam blocker that deleted spam texts. Occasionally I’ll get a notification alert on one before it gets deleted.
(Replying to myself)
Based on this page from Apple, I can think of a simpler / less creepy explanation: if you mistakenly touch the black “Apple Pay” button while in iMessage, it would be natural for an error message to appear about inability to send Frances money, and I guess it could be displayed as a transient / self-erasing message inside the conversation. I don’t have an iPhone to test this on, though.
Of course, since your girlfriend doesn’t have Apple Pay set up, the button probably shouldn’t be there in the first place, but modern UX is full of dark patterns like that.