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> Common questions about these changes Does not include a reason for this change or why is it a US only change.
Google Pay was rebranded as Google Wallet in the rest of the world in 2022. Only US and Singapore kept the Google Pay brand. (No idea why) https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pay-becomes-google-wall...
Google's history with their payment apps/platform is almost as convoluted as their history with message apps/platforms. I swear they have gone back and forth on Android Pay/Google Wallet/Google Pay a half dozen times.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Messages Web support was released in 2018
Yes, but the wiki is referencing this BI article[0]. Here is the relevant excerpt saying it was bad at first and people were missing messages: >> At launch, Messages for web wasn't very good. It worked, but it wasn't very reliable. Several texts didn't send properly, and I missed a bunch of text messages, too. It clearly wasn't the solution that would bring the iMessage functionality to the Android ecosystem, and I g…
To be completely clear, I am impressed with how well Google has evolved the remaining Comms apps (Meet, Chat, Messages) over the past three years -- especially Meet & Messages. Considering where things stood five years ago, it's been an epiphany.
I use Google Pay for many subscriptions, as well as every single time I take the subway. Am I to understand that is all going away? Or am I confusing "Google pay app" with some other vaguely-named Google feature?
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There's the Google Pay service that processes payments. There's the old Google Pay app that got rebranded as Google Wallet. And then there's a newer Google Pay app available only in the US, Singapore, and India. This is the one getting shutdown. See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay And a very helpful chart: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Googlepayments.svg
Jesus Christ that chart. What is going on over at Google???
The far right branch is the "Next Billion Users" stream that launched Tez, which at the time was explicitly and solely for the Indian market, but since it was superior to the Google Wallet/Pay at the time, the VP lead decided to aim for global adoption, which was the previous Pay-->Wallet-->Pay nonsense a couple years ago. That has failed, so now everything is reverting back to the original/primary branch on the far left, which is and has always been, owned by the Android team.
Google's history with their payment apps/platform is almost as convoluted as their history with message apps/platforms. I swear they have gone back and forth on Android Pay/Google Wallet/Google Pay a half dozen times.
I worked on Pixel for several years and used to excuse this stuff. Now, among other things, every time I need to open the app, I inevitably search for Google Pay instead of Wallet. Maybe I'll remember now that this happened. Android Pay -> Google Pay seemed fair, but IIRC, Google Pay -> Google Wallet was just a combo of shipping-the-org-chart and Apple me-too'ing. At the time, they were also leaking that there was go…
There was a collaboration (grant?) with Ross Anderson's team in Cambridge on secure NFC payments. Android supported those in 2013, but, of course, carriers had control of the secure element, so everything got derailed, to the point that Google tried desperate workarounds such as HCE, without luck. As we have all seen, tap to pay was actually invented by Apple in 2014.
So, yeah, things were even crazier and more complicated than you recall, but it wasn't always the case that people were copying Apple.
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I worked on Pixel for several years and used to excuse this stuff. Now, among other things, every time I need to open the app, I inevitably search for Google Pay instead of Wallet. Maybe I'll remember now that this happened. Android Pay -> Google Pay seemed fair, but IIRC, Google Pay -> Google Wallet was just a combo of shipping-the-org-chart and Apple me-too'ing. At the time, they were also leaking that there was go…
That is not entirely accurate or complete. The other week I dug up not one, not two, but three Google Wallet credit cards, from Discover and MasterCard, made between 10/2012 and 10/2013. The one from April 2013 even has NFC. They started as virtual cards that charged your real credit card(s), but the plan was to do more. There was a collaboration (grant?) with Ross Anderson's team in Cambridge on secure NFC payments.…
You're right, it wasn't just a Google credit card, I was referring specifically to this[^1], in 2020: Apple Card was announced as 'Apple is your bank'. (the article in my previous comment is the sunsetting of this rumor)
[^1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/17/21225276/google-apple-car...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not entirely accurate or complete. The other week I dug up not one, not two, but three Google Wallet credit cards, from Discover and MasterCard, made between 10/2012 and 10/2013. The one from April 2013 even has NFC. They started as virtual cards that charged your real credit card(s), but the plan was to do more. There was a collaboration (grant?) with Ross Anderson's team in Cambridge on secure NFC payments.…
I got there in 2016, so I'm bemused: there's a whole other layer that happened before. And Google Wallet changed to Google Pay which changed to Android Pay which changed to Google Pay and Google Wallet which is now changing to Google Wallet. The more things change... You're right, it wasn't just a Google credit card, I was referring specifically to this[^1], in 2020: Apple Card was announced as 'Apple is your bank'.…
Google's history with their payment apps/platform is almost as convoluted as their history with message apps/platforms. I swear they have gone back and forth on Android Pay/Google Wallet/Google Pay a half dozen times.
You forgot GPay! Which I think is a different app (I mean, it has a different name...) though I can't say I'm sure (Wikipedia says they're the same, but the source they use directly contradicts them). It's really comical at this point.