Starbucks will start accepting Apple Pay later this year

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Starbucks will begin accepting Apple Pay later this year, then start rolling out the payment option to all of its 7500 company-owned stores in 2016.

Apple Pay VP Jennifer Bailey made the announcement at the Code/mobile conference in Half Moon Bay Thursday.

Starbucks will begin a pilot program for Apple Pay at selected locations this year, then roll out the initiative to the rest of the stores next year.

It’s already possible to add credit to a user’s Starbucks app using Apple Pay, but users will soon be able to pay using a credit card stored in the Apple Wallet on an iPhone or Apple Watch.

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Bailey says that KFC will also start supporting Apple Pay next spring.

Bailey also said Best Buy just turned on support or Apple Pay today. Best Buy was one of the first supporters of the competing MCX mobile payment.

Apple says it had 220,000 merchants on board with Apple Pay at the beginning of the year and expects to pass 1.5 million by the end of the year.

Apple Pay supports credit cards, debit cards, and with rewards and store cards, but Bailey says Apple may be open to supporting more payment types on its platform in the future.

Samsung recently launched a mobile payment system that supports older magnetic strip technology, as a way of increasing the number of retailers and merchants where users can pay with their phone.

Bailey politely dismissed that strategy: “Our view on mag stripe is that it is 50-year-old technology,” she said. “We wanted to build for the future and create technology that will last for the next 50 years.”