14 DAY TRIAL // Google is working on bringing a credit card scanner to Chrome browser on iPhones, basically making the process of providing payment information on supported websites more seamless.
The purpose of this feature is to enhance the autocomplete support, as the scanner would technically be able to automatically determine details like the credit card number and fill it on a payment page.
A commit discovered by ChromeStory indicates that this feature would work similar to a barcode scanner.
“Implement credit card scanner screen. Implement Credit card scanner view & view controller as a subclass of QRScanner,” the commit reads.
No word on ETA just yet
Furthermore, posts in a Chrome developer discussion thread suggest that Google wants the feature to work just like the one on Android.
“This feature does not currently exist in Chrome for iOS. We strongly encourage developers to annotate their forms with autocomplete attributes as described in this article. This will ensure that users can autofill the form with their existing data or save newly entered data. But scanning with the camera is only available on Android,” one post reads.
“Chrome on Android has credit card scanner in both autofill and PaymentRequest. For autofill, Chrome must detect your input field to be credit card number for this option to show up,” one dev explains.
Google hasn’t yet announced this feature, but adding it to Chrome browser on iOS would obviously be a welcome update to make payments within the app more convenient.
Needless to say, there’s no ETA right now as to when the feature could go live, but given it’s already in the planning stage, it shouldn’t take too long before an early implementation sees daylight.
Developers would have to add support for this feature on their websites, but certainly, once it becomes available for all, all major payment pages should support it.