Meet the new Google Wallet, sort of the same as the old Google Wallet.
Google announced the latest in a long series of shifts to its mobile-payment-apps strategy Thursday in a post reporting the sunset of its Google Pay app in favor of its Google Wallet app.
“To simplify the app experience, the US version of the standalone Google Pay app will no longer be available for use starting June 4, 2024,” says Joris van Mens, Google Pay group product manager.
The post assures Android users that paying for things via NFC at everywhere from fast-food outlets to subway stations will remain unchanged, since the Wallet app already handles that, and notes that Wallet already sees five times the US usage of Pay.
But once the Google Pay app—listed as just “GPay” in an Android phone’s app list—shuts down in June, users will lose its ability to send and receive money from other GPay users. And the app already seems to have lost its discount-finding functions; a copy opened Thursday evening sported the error message: “Something went wrong and deals can’t be loaded.”
An Android user who had fallen asleep in 2011 and woke up Thursday afternoon would not be surprised to see Google offering a payments app named Google Wallet. But over the last 13 years, Google has repeatedly changed course in a way that evokes its incoherent messaging strategy. To recap the reorgs that have left the phrase “Google Wallet” with its own index page on Wikipedia:
Google debuted Google Wallet in 2011 and then saw it get ignored while AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon pushed a competing app first christened “Isis” before the rise of the terrorist death cult of the same name led to a hasty rebranding to “Softcard.”
After Softcard tanked despite such thumb-on-the-scale carrier moves as Verizon blocking Google Wallet from its version of the Galaxy Nexus, Google bought parts of Softcard in 2015 and then introduced Android Pay as a new tap-to-pay front end that would not replace Wallet.
In 2018, Google shipped Google Pay as the unified replacement for both Android Pay and Google Wallet.
In 2020, the company shipped a major rewrite of Google Pay that included a suite of personal-finance tools, with the advertised addition of mobile-first, no-fees banking accounts coming in 2021.
The banking venture never happened, while in 2021 Google shipped a new Google Pay app, based on a code base developed for the Indian market, that required you to sign up via your phone number instead of your Google account.
A year later, Google’s I/O developer conference brought news of a revived Google Wallet app that would displace Google Pay in most markets, but not in the US and Singapore.
The 2021 incarnation of Google Pay remains one of the few Google releases that saw the company resort to bribing users to interact more with it. In the spring of that year, a virtual-stamp-collecting exercise called the Google Pay Spring Challenge wound up making me $35, and in 2022 Google paid some users, myself included, 25-cent rewards to correct the app’s often inaccurate transaction data.
Now Google Pay seems completely useless; Google says it's safe to uninstall the app.
Google Pay users who had relied on its peer-to-peer money-transfer functions, however, will need to migrate to one of several non-Google-operated alternatives, such as PayPal, the PayPal-owned Venmo, Cash App, or Zelle.
Meanwhile, Samsung Wallet users can ignore this development. And iPhone users can bask smugly in the knowledge that Apple has stuck with a single name for its mobile-payment app since Apple Pay’s 2014 debut.
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