Subscription iPhone: Is Apple’s Service Coming in March? Apple’s rumored iPhone subscription service appears to be finally on its way, perhaps sometime in March or April.
Apple Maps, no app has bypassed the privacy controls
As early as the beginning of 2022, the first reports appeared suggesting that Apple wanted to expand its services business by also introducing hardware, providing iPhones and other devices to consumers for a monthly fee. However, having arrived in 2023, there is still no concrete information about it.
In the “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman insists that Apple is working on four fintech projects at the moment. Two of them, Apple Pay Later and Apple Card Savings Account, have already been announced. However, Apple is still developing the “Apple Pay Monthly Rates” and iPhone subscription program. The latter was already expected to be introduced in 2021 with the iPhone 13 or with the iPhone 14 in 2022, but faced “engineering and technical setbacks that led to slow progress and missed deadlines”.
Apple is developing Project Breakout
Both the iPhone subscription and the monthly installments project are still in development, Gurman writes, adding that it is clear that “the financial push has proved more difficult than expected.” This is in part because Apple is working on an underlying platform for its financial services called “Project Breakout,” which will include “checks, approvals, and transaction histories” that other financial services partners typically handle. While monthly installments service and iPhone subscription look similar in concept, they are actually different. In fact, the monthly iPhone Hardware Program charge “will not be the price of the device spread over 12 or 24 months,” says Gurman. Instead, it would be a “yet-to-be-determined monthly fee that depends on the user’s device choice” and not a fee that will necessarily lead to the user owning the device.