I don't see how this satisfies the inventive-step criteria needed for a patent. Any IT professional with the money to spend could whip up something like this.
The patent has been originally filed in UK in 2008.
Apple bought a few patents by two Finnish inventors (patent trolls?) a couple of years ago. This seems to be one of them. I don't know if they bought these patents directly or as a part of huge portfolio.
Application No. 12/664,079, which that assignment is based upon, and which Apple, Inc. also owns ("13/753,189 filed on 01-29-2013 which is Pending claims the benefit of 12/664,079"), has been pending in the USPTO's system since December, 2009. A final rejection was issued September 7, 2012, after which a Request for Continued Examination (RCE) was filed, and another non-final rejection was issued May 31, 2013. Pretty typical path for the USPTO.
I filed my mobile payments patent around the same time; it was finally granted in March. Apple e-mailed me saying that they wanted to buy it in late April. When they called to follow up they told me they'd contacted me in error. Oops. I guess they're placing their bets on this extremely vague application which should have zero chance of being granted instead?
With Droplet, the money resides in your Droplet account, not literally on the phone. When the money is sent, it is sent from Droplet to the merchant. The phone app requests the transfer but is not involved in it.
From the first claim in the Apple patent:
> issuance of a credit having monetary value to the mobile computing device
If I'm reading the claim correctly, it appears that the credit (or at least a credit authorization) is then on your phone, not in an account.
There are also some strange clauses about the separation of sponsor and issuer of the credit that make this patent a little less obvious than it might seem. The authorization comes from the sponsor (likely your bank) but the credit is issued from the issuer (likely Apple).
