Dive Brief:

• Square has launched the Square In-App Payments Software Development Kit, which will allow developers, merchants and other sellers to use Square to process payments within their own branded mobile apps, according to a Square blog post.

• The In-App Payments SDK can be used to create an end-to-end, PCI-compliant, Square-powered payment flow with a few lines of additional code, Square stated. The SDK is available for iOS, Android and Flutter in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia and Japan.

• The SDK has been beta-tested and used by ticketing and registration platform Brushfire, and by PepperHQ, which develops merchant-branded mobile apps for hospitality sector companies to support order-ahead and mobile payments capabilities.

Dive Insight:

Square launched years ago with the aim to give small merchants and individual sellers an easy, inexpensive and mobile platform for processing credit card payments. The world has changed since then, with the payments environment becoming more complex in terms of all the different modes, methods and platforms merchants need to support.

In response, Square has broadened its capabilities to support things like pay-by-installment programs. One trend it hadn't caught up with until now was the movement among retailers to embrace new technologies to process digital payments in their own apps.

This SDK will help Square to compete more effectively with PayPal and Stripe on the in-app payment front as it seeks to help more of its merchant clients upgrade their in-app features. In many cases small sellers who looked to avoid painful transaction processing fees, matured to the point where they developed their own apps and sell through those apps.

On the other hand, many small merchants that used Square initially adopted it to take the next step to become larger and more serious operations. If they are ready to process in-app payments, they're likely to do so by working with an outside developer. Those developers may be the bigger target of this launch.

Square can now help merchants and their developer partners take the next step, enabling them to have professional, fully-featured sales apps and payment processing platforms similar to much larger retailers. With 45% of online shoppers completing purchases through mobile smartphones, according to a recent PYMNTS.com study, it may be time for this part of the retail sector to take that next step.