Last week we talked about how Apple Pay was going to make shopping much easier, by letting us ditch our wallets at home and now we’re pleased to announce that Apple Pay is now available with the iOS 8.1 update.

Apple Pay is Now Available

Apple Pay is now available for all the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners who update to the new iOS 8.1. The update was rolled out today and it’s about 100MB in size. You can go to your iPhone’s Settings/General/Software Update and you’ll find your update there or you can update through iTunes.

Apple Pay is only supported by iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus because they have the dedicated chip and the NFC connectivity that permits them to communicate with retail terminals. They also feature a secure element that will store credit card data safely and also a unique number called the device account number.

Apple Pay is now available and supports debit and credit cards from Visa, MasterCard and American Express, issued by banks including Capital One, Bank of America, Citi, Chase and Wells Fargo. It was announced last week by Apple that it managed to tie up with 500 banks for the Apple Pay service.

But the new iOS 8.1 update brings us much more than Apple Pay. It debuts the return of Camera Roll, a feature that was cut when iOS 8 was introduced. The users have complained to Apple about and it was brought back.

Apart from these new features, iOS 8.1 also fixes some bugs that the Wi-Fi had. It also fixes a bug that prevented the iPhone to connect to hands-free devices via Bluetooth. Other fixed bugs include bugs that caused the screen to stop rotating and Safari not to play videos.

With iOS 8.1 Apple has enabled HealthKit to access data in the background and it made other minor accessibility improvements.
The iOS 8.1 update is made available for iPhone 4s and newer models, iPad 2 and newer models, the third gen Apple TV and the fifth gen iPod touch.