ApplePay is built on top of the existing credit card infrastructure and all the merchant fees that come with it. Making a transaction slightly more convenient for a customer is not much of an incentive for a business owner when the customer can already pay with a card. Plus, what incentive does a merchant have for allowing ApplePay when they have to fork over an additional 0.15% on the transaction?

The sorry state of the industry is that the payment network processors have absolutely no interest in reducing their inflation-proof fee schedule. Unless Apple made its own network from the ground up with dramatically lower fees, it was never going to take off with merchants.