iOS 8 can scan your credit card for super-fast online payments

You’re in a trance, scrolling aimlessly, browsing for things you absolutely don’t need. Then it comes to entering your card information, and the spell is broken. You realise that you don’t actually need an £85 crate of magnetic silly putty, and you back off immediately. We call this the laziness buffer, and we’re forever thankful for it.

Sadly, this safety net will no longer exist for iOS 8 users, as Apple has injected the latest version of Safari with an incredibly useful feature (spotted by 9to5Mac), which lets you take a photo of your payment card before automatically filling in all the payment fields with its details.

You can of course just save your payment details on the Passwords and AutoFill settings, but this one-off method will be more secure if you happen to lose your iDevice.

Presumably, given Apple’s focus on security, the photo of your card never leaves your device, or is ever even stored locally on it. We imagine that once Safari’s optical character recognition does its thing, any images of the card are gone forever.

Websites don’t have to make any changes to support this new feature, as Safari detects payment fields automatically.

You can of course already make quick impulse purchases using the fingerprint-scanning Touch ID home button, but currently that’s only compatible with sites that accept PayPal.

Another notable update to Safari on iOS is the ability to requst dektop sites, if you’d rather not have the mobile version, a feature requested by iOS users since the dawn of time. 

READ MORE: iOS 8 preview – everything you need to know

[9to5Mac]