The gist: Android phones come with Google Wallet where you can load up tickets and payment, loyalty, & transit cards to use w/contactless or barcode readers. In the US, you also get the GPay/Google Pay app where you can do peer-to-peer payments and link your bank account(s) to see insights. This was going to be Google’s bank offering before that fell through. They’re shuttering the latter to focus on Wallet.
@cassidy This is so badly framed as it is very US centric. Google Pay accounts for almost 30-40 percent of all merchant and peer-to-peer payments in India. A headline with "google pay is dead" is just not good.
@hemish I mean, I’m in the US, explicitly mentioned the US, and link to the article that spells out this is about the US. It’s not the headline of the article, just a thing I said. 😜
@jonah the alternative was not doing anything and keeping two confusingly similar apps, so I think this is the right move—as long as they see it through and work to consolidate things more instead of coming up with another new app.
@cassidy TBH, I got this yesterday and didn't understand the announcement. I use my Android phone to pay for things, and the transactions show on my phone in GPay. Now how do I keep track of transactions?
@passthejoe I mean, you still see your transactions in your bank app. Perhaps they'll add an area for contactless transactions in Wallet, but I never really understood the point of showing that.
However, “Google Pay” will still exist as a service integrated into Android, Chrome, etc. to facilitate paying for things in apps and on websites; it’s just not an app.
At first this sounds like typical Google shuttering/duplicating hijinks, but I think it is actually good: paring back duplicate apps and experiences is crucial, and it the number one thing have wanted from Google for years. Hopefully they don’t re-introduce a new and slightly different Google Pay app in six months, though. 😅
@cassidy it’s the right thing, but how on earth did they let it get so bad in the first place? If they didn’t have that monopoly cash flow any other company with product management and branding this incompetent would have been dead a long time ago.
@SwooshyCueb@cassidy Yep, that's really annoying. For a long time I was able to bypass that stupid root check using Magisk but somehow it stopped working last week and I can't use my phone to pay anymore.
@LukaszHorodecki@SwooshyCueb this sounds like you're mad at Google for enforcing security features of their payment system rather than for shuttering an app.
On Android you can use alternate contactless payment providers; if you don’t like Google’s security, you don’t have to use it? 🤷
@cassidy@LukaszHorodecki google is taking away my ability to send people money via google pay because I refuse to carry around a computer on my person that I do not have administrative access to.
@SwooshyCueb@LukaszHorodecki oh, they're taking away the ability for anyone to do peer-to-peer payments, that doesn't have anything to do with root. If you mean paying with contactless, then yeah, that’s always been their policy. You can try using an alternative contactless app but I imagine they all have similar policies.
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