vanfruniken

Talking about holdouts, in Belgium, only one major bank (Fortis), and a few small internet outfits, are NOT holdouts.
There is an abundance of individual bank apps for payments, as wel as a few dedicated apps that are pushed by the major debet card companies (payconiq, bancontact), but no general acceptance of Apple Pay whatsoever.

Apple is very slow on the draw for several of its technologies:
- Apple Pay (worldwide rollout)
- FaceTime (SJ: we will open it up for others, so it becomes a standard)
- HomeKit
- Apple TV,
even now Apple can't count on repeat performances of late entries in the market like when the iPod blew away the MP3-player scene.
A good thing that the appStore and Music are getting more worldwide exposure now.

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About the appStore:
  for international use, the appStore review system is still fatally flawed, because users can only see the user reviews from the LOCAL APPSTORE. How weird is this?

In smaller appStores, (EVEN OF SMALL ENGLISH-LANGUAGE COUNTRIES), users won't be able to access statistically relevant reviews that they can easily read and understand.

All it takes is a user preference for the AppStore.app where one can select the appStores/languages.

I for one am able to read Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish reviews. The most important community is the English language one.

After all, most apps are country and language-agnostic: Unless they are developed for local use, they remain relevant for a very large community, that we are now missing completely.

Just too bad Apple Pay isn't available for most cards in Belgium (even though some major stores already accept it).
In Apple's defense, it must be said that our banks are playing 'hard to get".
Maybe non-US Apple Pay is just a hobby, allowing other players to grab more and more market share, leaving much of the market to Android or a plethora of banking apps.
For Apple TV we're still waiting for a unified, channel-less, platform.