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Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

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Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#11

> English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. In all my years of living in India, I've not come across one person using anything other than English. Most people, even in IT, hadn't the slightest clue about how to type their own language into a PC. Didn't stop them from being "proud" of though.

Not sure what echo chamber you live in. Many people in India don't speak, read or write English. Most of them carry and use mobile phones. Why would you exclude them from using the app?

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#12
post #2

This is certainly good for India. I predict, over time, cash-less transactions in India will increase, as more companies start investing in cashless transactions.

More companies? There are like 50 different apps for passing money around in India. Not to include Uber and Ola. The issue to be settled is onboarding merchants and fighting regulations.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#14
post #10

Not even a day and see the number of negative comments on the playstore.

I read your comment and checked the app page. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...) It had 4.5 stars. I was like what is this commenter talking about.

I then dig into the comments and there are a massive number of negative comments. I am not sure what is happening here but the rating seems artificially inflated. It shows that there are only 9 1-stars and yet in comments there are way more 1-stars. Really sad to see this sort of gaming at the play store level.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#15
Not having a wallet option is a deal breaker.

Cashless payments is very popular amongst youth here and majority of us college students don't have a functional bank account which makes us either carry our parents debit cards or our parents "Paytm" us (yes, it's become a verb here) our monthly pocket money.

Regardless of that, there is still a very poor adoption of cashless modes of payments by street hawkers and kirana stores. And many high revenue businesses I have seen going directly for card POS systems like mswipe etc as wallets have some monthly limits and high fees for transferring to bank account. So the competition for tez is with physical card swipes and seeing the overall internet connection health even in the cities, it's a pain to use apps to pay majority of the times.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#16
"Government of India has made it mandatory to link your Aadhar number with your Tez account. Please link your Aadhar number to enjoy uninterrupted service." - Waiting for this to happen. My Indian friends say they are getting these messages from the Income Tax department, their banks and even their ISPs, e-wallets providers, telcoms etc.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#17
post #10

Not even a day and see the number of negative comments on the playstore.

I read your comment and checked the app page. ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... ) It had 4.5 stars. I was like what is this commenter talking about. I then dig into the comments and there are a massive number of negative comments. I am not sure what is happening here but the rating seems artificially inflated. It shows that there are only 9 1-stars and yet in comments there are way mor…

I don't know how the Play Store commenting system works, but I think before jumping to conclusions then it's important to consider that if there were any foul play then it would probably have been better achieved through "shadowbanning". I do feel it would make sense if the Play Store didn't count comments made by newly registered users or known bots.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#18

"Government of India has made it mandatory to link your Aadhar number with your Tez account. Please link your Aadhar number to enjoy uninterrupted service." - Waiting for this to happen. My Indian friends say they are getting these messages from the Income Tax department, their banks and even their ISPs, e-wallets providers, telcoms etc.

This is a story i'm trying to understand. 1. Indian Government wants to emulate something like SSN (in the US) as a single identifier for every citizen in this country. 2. This is an easy way for a Government to track the actions of every individual digitally and financially - end of Privacy!

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#19

"Government of India has made it mandatory to link your Aadhar number with your Tez account. Please link your Aadhar number to enjoy uninterrupted service." - Waiting for this to happen. My Indian friends say they are getting these messages from the Income Tax department, their banks and even their ISPs, e-wallets providers, telcoms etc.

The recent decision of Supreme Court about right to privacy will prevent this in future. I'm not sure about what exactly will happen to Adhaar ID but, we may see that linking-it-with-every-account thing reduced a lot.

Re: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

#20
post #11

> English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. In all my years of living in India, I've not come across one person using anything other than English. Most people, even in IT, hadn't the slightest clue about how to type their own language into a PC. Didn't stop them from being "proud" of though.

Not sure what echo chamber you live in. Many people in India don't speak, read or write English. Most of them carry and use mobile phones. Why would you exclude them from using the app?

That comment is either just a low effort troll attempt or made by someone not at all familiar with India and definitely not familiar with her linguistic diversity. Or maybe someone with extremely limited existence in one of this country's many urban bubbles.

In fact had Google launched the app only in English or English+Hindi I would have been really surprised because they would been losing on the clear majority of India - the rural India, 2nd tier cities, and town and below. Internet is exploding there, clearly engendered by Reliance Jio and other operators following close and in panic.

Also, the way Govt went all guerrilla on demonetisation (nationwide) and the way Govt is pushing digital money the larger population, who are not at all proficient in English, will have to come on board the digital payment system (and in my humble opinion will have to suffer a lot because planning and infra neither are well prepared; but that's another matter) and for the inclusion of regional languages are not a smart move per se, but a must.

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