However Apple is providing something in all this. Apple Pay requires biometrics which (in theory) should help lower fraud costs for everyone. So it’s not like they’re just rent seeking for nothing.
I don’t know how it went for everyone else, but I don’t remember tapped pay getting popular until after Apple Pay and Apple pushing it. I know that coincided with when EMV terminals really started to get popular because the credit card companies were forcing it. But I honestly wonder if they helped push it to the mainstream, even for people just using tap cards.
It's regional—tap with cards was fairly popular in Canada before Apple Pay came along, but every time I visited the US I remember being surprised at how many retailers supported only the magnetic stripe.
No one wanted to put on EMV terminals because they didn’t want to pay the upgrade cost. Even if they bought them because they were the only thing, they wouldn’t turn any of the EMV stuff on. You still did everything like 1995. It was the liability shift that finally forced people to start. And that coincided well with Apple Pay. Which obviously was planned by Apple.
I also remember people hating it and trying to avoid it because it was so slow early on.
On the other hand, a lot of places that supported tap to pay didn’t even know. Lots of times when I started using Apple Pay I got confusion from the person checking me out. “What did you do, how did you pay” or “I didn’t know you could do that”. Multiple times retailers I used it at stopped taking it later. I assume they found out people were using it and freaked out because they didn’t know it was on.
There are still lots of retailers where the signs don’t say you can use it, or even the screens on the terminals, but it works fine. It’s still kind of mess but it generally works almost everywhere.