Apple’s announcements yesterday — literally a day after Braintree & Paypal announced their new love affair with Coinbase and Bitcoin, respectively — has thrown the crypto community into a two-stage loopdeeloop.

At Techcrunch Disrupt, the CEO of Braintree announced that they would be working with Coinbase to integrate Bitcoin payments into the Braintree platform. Braintree doesn’t have much of a presence in the Philippines, although their merchants include A-list brands such as Airbnb, Uber, and LivingSocial. Although Braintree is an EBay company (they bought them for $800MM last year), this announcement doesn’t necessarily mean that Paypal itself will be using Bitcoin anytime soon but, when coupled with the almost cult-like video ad they produced, it’s a very good sign.

How big is Braintree? Their payment platform reportedly processes $12B in transactions per year, which is comparable in size to Bitcoin’s own volume. If you look at the transaction volume of the past 60 days, we’ve been averaging about $50MM a day, which equates to about $18B per year. (Granted, plenty of off-chain transactions within the “walled gardens” of Coinbase and Xapo are occurring everyday as well, so that number could be much bigger.)

This milestone certainly felt like it had all the gravitas of a turning point in the industry. At least, until Apple announced their new payments platform.

ApplePay is exactly what you’d expect from a company that has spent decades simplifying human-machine interaction by controlling the entire process from end-to-end. Since your iTunes account already has your credit card information, you will now be able to use NFC to tap your iPhone 6 against a participating merchant POS to initiate a purchase. Your CC details are encrypted and shot across to the POS, and a successful purchase is logged in the cloud. You’re in and out in under 30 seconds, in theory.

Apple’s moves stand in rather stark contrast with the earlier Braintree announcement. While Apple solidifies its position as a centralized, single-point financial solution, Paypal (possibly for lack of choice) seems to be heading in the opposite direction and embracing as many payment platforms as they can handle.

At this point, Apple’s service does seem like the more compelling alternative, at least in terms of stability and coverage. But that’s assuming you’ve bought into the whole Apple ecosystem in the first place.

In the Philippines, the majority of our population will only ever have access to Apple devices through the second-hand market, and with a meager 5% credit card penetration rate, the promise of ApplePay is dubious at best. (ASEAN neighbours Indonesia and Thailand are equally credit-card-unfriendly, with 2% and 5% penetration respectively.)

Of the 39 million Filipinos who currently own smartphones, an estimated 91% are Android users. (It’s the highest in the ASEAN region, with the average being closer to 70%.)

The reason behind the dominating position is clear: an entry-level Android smartphone can be purchased brand-new here for PhP1,500 (US$35) in any mall or store. Your average entry-level iPhone will cost at least 15X that. Sure, your cheap little Android will probably be running Gingerbread on modest specs, it won’t have NFC, and it won’t attach to your (non-existent) credit card. But guess what, you can run a Bitcoin wallet app on it for free, and so can the merchant you want to buy stuff from.

Feature parity will inevitably be achieved, humble and partially duct-taped as it may be.

In the developed world, companies will continue to innovate ways to improve credit card-based payments, but in countries like the Philippines, that’s a dead-end strategy that ignores the realities of the developing world.

It’s safe to say that we were never the target for services like ApplePay in the first place, and personally I’m happy to continue innovating in ways that make sense in our context and environment. We may never be as slick as ApplePay, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be as impactful.