This is how PayPal will take over your phone

PayPal and Braintree are finally bringing the magic of Venmo Touch to PayPal transactions.

If you’ve got PayPal on your phone, you’ll soon be able to pay for things in other apps with a single touch and without logging back into PayPal every single time.

PayPal and Braintree announced today that they’re kicking off beta access to this one-touch PayPal payments capability with a few merchant apps using their new v.Zero SDK, while more merchants will be added in the coming weeks.

“I think one-touch buying will really be foundational over the next couple years … where devices without keyboard become primary computing devices,” said Braintree CEO Bill Ready in an interview with VentureBeat.

Imagine you download a new shopping app and immediately come across a killer pair of sneakers. You’d be far more likely to complete that purchase if you only had to make a single swipe to pay with PayPal (assuming it’s already on your phone), compared to finding your wallet and plugging in your payment details. It’s also far simpler than logging into competing payment platforms like Amazon or Google Wallet (which you typically don’t find in many mobile apps).

Braintree’s new SDK, combined with this new payment feature, has the potential to make PayPal the go-to payments destination for mobile consumers and developers alike.

The one-touch payment feature is an evolution of what Venmo Touch originally offered when it launched last year. It’s particularly important today as many app developers are working hard to drive mobile purchases. (One-touch payments also one of the features that originally convinced PayPal to snap up Braintree last year, Ready said.)

Remember that PayPal and Braintree positioned the v.Zero SDK as the best way for developers to implement PayPal today. It includes both Braintree’s usual payment processing options as well as support for PayPal payments. Today’s news shows another advantage of the new SDK: major upgrades without much work. Merchants who’ve already upgraded to the v.Zero SDK will automatically be able to take advantage of PayPal’s one-touch payment capabilities.

Unfortunately, the feature is only available on iOS today while it’s in beta, but PayPal says it will be on Android when it officially launches next month.

Ready didn’t say much about how developers are adopting the new Braintree SDK, but he noted that “we think the future for the world of shopping is that if you have half of e-commerce shopping occurring on mobile, you should have half of e-commerce purchases happening on mobile.”