Venmo's in-app purchases are now available to everyone

You'll soon be able to use Venmo for much more than just paying friends.

Nearly six months after taking its first steps to expand beyond person-to-person payments, Paypal-owned Venmo is now opening up its in-app purchase abilities to all its users. Beginning Wednesday, users will be able to make purchases within nearly a dozen apps using their existing Venmo accounts. 

Previously only available to a limited group of beta testers, Venmo's in-app purchasing will work a lot like that used by Apple Pay and Android Pay. Users will now see a Venmo option when checking out in one of Venmo's partner apps. 

After completing a purchase, users can choose to share the transaction to Venmo's social feed or split the bill with friends in the app. It's these social interactions — splitting and sharing purchases — that stand to set Venmo apart in an increasingly crowded payments space, according to Jo Lambert, PayPal's vice president of consumer product.

"From a merchant's perspective, it's pretty huge because it opens up a whole new customer base and referral network for our merchant partners," Lambert tells Mashable. "It basically opens the door to millions of socially-connected consumers."

IMAGE: VENMO

For Venmo, expanding into in-app payments marks a significant milestone in that it's the first time PayPal can begin to monetize its payments app in a meaningful way. While user transactions will work the same (free for debit and checking accounts and a 3% fee for credit cards), merchant partners pay a fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per each transaction.

The app has 11 merchant partners for now (it began its beta in January with just two) but Lambert says the company expects to add more apps soon now that the service is out of beta. 

Here's a full list of all the apps accepting payments via Venmo:

• Munchery 
• Gametime 
• Poshmark 
• delivery.com 
• Priv
• Hop Market
• Wish 
• Parking Panda, 
• Dolly, 
• Urgentli
• Boxed

PayPal drives another nail into the Windows Phone and BlackBerry coffins

In February, PayPal launched a new version of its mobile app, 6.0, and it wants iPhone and Android users to upgrade to it until the end of June. Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Amazon Fire users, however, are getting a different message: Paypal is discontinuing the app on these platforms on June 30. 

In an announcement post Wednesday, PayPal VP Joanna Lambert explained that Windows Phone users will still be able to access PayPal on the mobile web, through both Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge. Likewise, Amazon Fire and BlackBerry users are advised to switch to the mobile web experience, though the post notes that on BlackBerry, you can continue to use the BBM app to send peer-to-peer PayPal payments. 

"It was a difficult decision to no longer support the PayPal app on these mobile platforms, but we believe it’s the right thing to ensure we are investing our resources in creating the very best experiences for our customers. We remain committed to partnering with mobile device providers, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our customers," Lambert wrote. 

It's no surprise that support for BlackBerry and Windows Phone is dwindling. In a recent Gartner report, the two platforms had less than 1% market share between them (Windows had 0.7% and BlackBerry had 0.2%). In February, WhatsApp announced it would no longer support BlackBerry at the end of 2016. And several companies, including GoPro and Here dropped support for Windows Phone this year. 

BlackBerry has been coping with its ever-shrinking market share by pivoting to Android; the company said in April it plans to release two Android phones this year. Microsoft's mobile future is somewhat muddier, but with the company recently selling its feature phone business, and laying off 1,850 employees from its smartphone division, it looks as if Windows Phone's fate is sealed.