Square Card Case is now an improved 'Pay with Square'
The offering still lets customers pay for purchases from their mobile devices, but now makes it easier to find merchants that use Square's service.
Square has delivered a few improvements (and a new name) to its mobile payment service.
The application formerly known as Card Case has been rebranded "Pay With Square," the company announced today. Square hasn't said why it changed its mobile app's name, but the branding appears to make it clearer to users what they should do with the app. Card Case was, after all, a cryptic name for a mobile-payment solution.
Pay With Square comes with the same features users found in Card Case, allowing them to pay for products at merchant stores that support Square without ever needing to take their credit cards out. To improve the experience a bit, the company has made it easier for users to find Square-approved merchants by pulling them from the old version's virtual wallet and placing them in plain view. In addition, users can now find merchants by scrolling through a map or searching from the program.
Square has also added a host of social features, including allowing users to add businesses to their favorites list and then share those with friends.
The challenge for Pay With Square is to break out from its niche and become a mainstream competitor to services like Google Wallet. At this point, the mobile payments space is up for grabs with no firm taking a dominant position. Whether it'll be Square, Google, the joint carrier venture Isis, or countless other mobile payment solutions that actually takes hold remains to be seen.
For Square, the odds seem to be against it. According to All Things Digital, which first reported on the new app, only 75,000 of Square's 1 million merchants allow for payments through Pay With Square. According to the Google Wallet Web site, MasterCard PayPass -- just one of the ways users can pay with Wallet -- is available at more than 140,000 merchant locations across the U.S.
Pay With Square is available now in the App Store and Android Market. The app works on all iPhone flavors, as well as Samsung's Galaxy line, the HTC Evo 3D, the Nexus S, and the Motorola Photon 4G.