Starbucks Corp. finally has an official mobile payment offering for Android smartphones.
The Seattle company said it plans to release its first official app on Google Inc.'s Android Market on Wednesday, nearly two years after rolling out a test of its mobile payments service initially available to only Apple Inc.'s iPhone users. The app lets customers pay for purchases by showing cashiers a bar code on the phone's screen.
The Android operating system now exceeds the marketshare of Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd.
Starbucks said it focused on iPhone and BlackBerry handsets first because there was higher demand for those platforms, but today, the No. 1 question the retailer has gotten from customers is: "When are you guys going to do an official Starbucks Android app," Chuck Davidson, the category manager for innovation on the Starbucks Card team, said during a webcast with reporters and analysts on Tuesday.
A private developer created his own versions of the app early this year. Those unofficial apps have been downloaded more than 160,000 times.
Davidson said he could not comment on unofficial applications but touted the usability and security of Starbucks' official apps, stressing that they do not store users' card data on the handsets. With the addition of the Android app, 90% of its customers with smartphones will be able to make mobile payments, he said.
Starbucks began testing its service in a limited number of stores in fall 2009, expanding it to 1,000 Starbucks locations inside Target Corp. stores in April 2010. It added a BlackBerry app last fall, and expanded the service to about 6,800 corporate-owned stores nationwide through a commercial rollout in January. Starbucks is also adding mobile payment acceptance to its 1,000 stores located inside Safeway Inc. supermarkets this summer.
Davidson said Starbucks worked to develop the Android app with the operating system's characteristics in mind.
Starbucks didn't want to "crank out an iPhone version made for Android," Davidson said. "We spent the time to actually do the Android version correctly using Android best practices."
The app allows customers to load their Starbucks prepaid card accounts into a mobile app. After the cashier scans the bar code the app generates, money is deducted from the prepaid account to fund the purchase.
All of Starbucks' mobile apps also allow users to reload funds to the prepaid account and access details of their loyalty accounts.
In March, Starbucks said customers had used its apps to pay for more than 3 million transactions. Davidson said an updated figure was not available but the company is seeing rapid adoption.
"Once they use it, they use it again," Davidson said.
Like with its existing apps, Starbucks worked with the mobile vendor mFoundry Inc. to develop the Android app.
