Google Pay

> Forgive me, but isn't this what Google Wallet was, at one point?

Not exactly, as it includes things that were never part of Wallet.

> Then at some point Google Wallet was split out into Android Pay. And now it's Google Pay?

Android Pay was a renamed acquisition that was originally intended to be merged with Wallet but was kept apart (but Wallet’s NFC payment feature was retired as Android Pay was brought online, which made it look like Wallet was being split up.)

But Google Pay seems to merge in a number of other siloed app-specific Google payment features as well.as Wallet and Android Pay (these clearly have been integrated behind the scenes for a while, since their “pay with Google” feature leveraged payment methods you had registered through any of them or Wallet or Android Pay), so this looks like the UI and branding catching up with backend integration.

The most Google thing to do would now be to deprecate Android pay, no longer support merchants who don't upgrade their point of sale systems, and provide no contact line for support.

Don’t you get it? The fact that they’ve done all of this with it just makes it a very Google thing to do. Therefore, Google Pay.

Google has caught MMD (Microsoft Marketing Disease), in which companies endlessly rebrand and rename products that are successful, but not market-leading, in an effort to become the market leader, but end up fragmenting their own brands further by alienating existing loyal users and confusing late-adopters and casual observers who don't follow the branding news. This marketing-driven disease spreads to other parts of the business, as engineers see a rebranding as a legitimate time to break backwards-compatibility, but they aren't given the lead-time or budget for a full rework, so the new product is similar enough to the old product that it's obviously just a rehash, but different enough so that nothing that worked with the old thing will easily work with the new thing.

MMD keeps managers, marketers, product teams, and engineering leads busy, and makes executives believe progress is being made since all the metrics look good: there are tech blog articles, Twitter mentions, Hacker News threads, maybe a mainstream media hit or two; all the teams have finite task lists that are getting done; and there's an initial jump in brand awareness and new user engagement. The actual damage to the brand doesn't happen until long enough down the road that the brilliant minds who came up with the idea have collected their bonus checks, awards, and promotions, and moved onto better things.

And now the executives start talking up the need for a new marketing strategy... lather, rinse, repeat.

Google apparently create competing apps on purpose to see which team wins

Google is bad at product, period.

> There is no user purchase validation step! I just swipe my phone and transaction is done. I get this is the same as using a CC but in theory there is such a huge opportunity to improve the experience. How about popping up a thing where I confirm the purchase, even add a tip or sign for some purchases? WTF???

I disagree with you here. I want the payment to be as fast and painless as possible. A "tip" screen, a "sign" screen, etc. would all be very annoying. I suppose adding these optionally somehow could work though.

On a technical note, it's not quite the same as swiping a CC. There's some authentication to start - you must authenticate on your phone (via fingerprint or pattern or whatever lock mechanism you have) before you can make a payment. In addition, a one-time token is sent instead of your actual CC number, so the retailer couldn't reuse your payment info. In other words, it's much more secure than "signing" ever was and you get some nice security benefits by using your phone as opposed to swiping a credit card.

> How about popping up a thing where I confirm the purchase, even add a tip or sign for some purchases?

I may be wrong but as far as I know this simply isn't possible with the existing contactless payment protocol. That standard goes way beyond Google (and they don't command anywhere near enough of the market to make their own addition to it).

> cards listed are only viewable as huge generic CC images and you can't customize either the image or even give it a name.

The generic images are only used for cards that do not participate in Android Pay, and that use the fallback mechanism for unsupported cards. Participating cards get fully branded images from the participating bank.

> When making payments there is no quick way to select which card you want to pay with.

You can apparently make app shortcuts to individual cards, if you have the Pixel launcher or a third-party launcher with similar features.

I used Apple Pay for the first time recently and it felt like magic. Just hover it near, choose your credit card (which had a full sized image), and then it instantly pays using Touch ID. I think some of the issues you listed with Google Pay are the same issues with Apple Pay.

I also really like WeChat Pay, very convenient, customizable, and verifiable.

Apple Pay feels very "magical" while WeChat Pay feels very "careful/customizable".

> even add a tip or sign for some purchases?

Why would anyone want to sign on a phone? Why would anyone want to sign for a credit card purchase at all?

Consider this the obligatory comment of "why do Americans want to sign for credit card purchases when PIN is so much better?". I don't even think I have a signature on my card.

I haven't even swiped or inserted my card in months, everything is contactless with my card, I'm concerned I'll forget my PIN.

Can you make a payment with locked screen? Otherwise, isn't having the screen unlocked consent enough?

Copyright claims don't affect a user's ability to login to their google account.. what are you talking about?

Yup. Same reason I spread my risk with a bunch of Amazon products rather than stick to any one ecosystem. It's either that or abandon the whole system altogether.

I agree. Over a decade ago when I was a freshman in college I participated in an AdSense click ring with my dormmates. We made $200 or so each, which was cool at that age. Within a few months we got caught and banned from AdSense. Now I have a YouTube channel with tens of thousands of viewers but I can’t monetize it at all, even though YouTube wasn’t even part of the same company as AdSense when my silly freshman experiment went down.

My best friend got locked out of his Google account over some videos he uploaded to YT in 2007. They got flagged only last month and his account got locked. He even has trouble with his Gapps on his Android phone.

I told him long time ago to deGoogle himself as much as possible but he didn't listen. Now he can't access anything. It's ridiculous. But that's Google for ya.

Yep, it's really annoying how Google forces all their services to be completely integrated together, and not even integrated well. Lots of issues with glitchy account switching.

Less scrupulous executives and managers at Google[0] could wield great power. For example, let's say you post something online that's critical of Google. Google may have the capability to trace it to you and then maybe your business doesn't appear as high in search results, or you have trouble with your YouTube channel. And how would you know? Who could you complain to?

Perhaps some regulation is needed, at least in areas where one company wields enormous market power.

[0] That may sound unlikely now, but executives come and go and things change rapidly. How do you think Uber under Kalanick would handle this kind of power, for example.

I can confirm that a ~10-year-old ban (due to a mistake on their part) on Google Wallet is still carried over to Google Pay.

You can, of course, do this yourself with separate accounts for each service, as long as the services are actually different and can be used separately.

For instance, I have a Google account for using Google (the search product), but a separate account for YouTube, and if I used Google Domains or Gmail, I would definitely have separate accounts for those things as well.

I bought something from Google play when I was living in country x and now that I live in country y I cannot install anything that is limited to country y. In order to get Google to "forget" that I lived in country x I would have to give Google my credit card number that is located in country y. I don't want to change my address, all I want to do is make Google "forget" my old address.

Because of that I refuse to buy anything with my Google account

I think all-in-one accounts would work if the user themselves owned the data instead of Google; honestly I'm a bit annoyed that I need to have a separate account / identity for every webpage I visit.

Exactly why I use Dropbox instead of Google Drive, my bank's Paywave app over Apple/Google Pay, Todoist over Google Tasks, and even Firefox over Chrome (because of bookmarks sync, addons sync, form fields, etc).

I can't split my Email from YouTube (which I really enjoy as products and am very active on YouTube), so if those get locked, I can still live most of my life.

This. I mean, it takes lot of effort to keep up with Google's "throw it all on the wall and see what sticks" approach as a user.

People chide Apple for not moving fast enough, but in many cases, being stable is more important than refactoring every 2 years.

Also, they have had Hangouts, Messenger, Talk, Voice, Allo, and Duo... most with the same functionality. What is up with Google's product management? Is there a strategy?

And there's Tez in India and no one even remembers Handsfree

And it's still only credit cards. Like how many iterations can you possibly have on CC processing. Add debit and then it becomes a lot more useful, but no.

Ars Technica calls this a "merge" of all those payments solutions. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/google-rebrands-all-...

They're all trying to Venmo-ify payments. You run a balance on their platform and just pay with that.

Tech companies are trying to become outright banks, but with none of the FDIC insurance or other safeguards that goes along with it lol. Innovation...

Huh, I still use wallet for P2P transfers. What do you mean by failed, and is it going away?

Not to mention the various payment options for their services, which sometimes integrate with Wallet/Pay and sometimes don't.

From what I've read, that's always been the way the company operates. I read on here years ago that Google 'regularly cuts off its own limbs', and never seen it so succinctly put.

It's incredibly frustrating because if you look at something like their messaging strategy, it makes no sense. They come out with a new way to message people seemingly every year and then abandon it instead of building on their base and giving consumers the things they actually want.

In this case, it's a welcome consolidation of different existing wallet/payment products.

All large companies seem to have trouble with branding as politics take over and each group wants to have its own spotlight. Apple arguably had better luck due to strong centralized leadership, although that's also become undone in recent years.

>They're not stupid

And yet this blog page wastes ~1/3 of the vertical space with a top and bottom bar.

Why do you assume they are not stupid? Individuals and groups even at companies that are, on average, pretty smart can easily be really really incompetent. I think this is really common at google where they have lots of awesome products but still many seem either abandoned or led by people who are misguided.

Perhaps because Google is currently working on a potential Android successor in the name of Fuchsia. Knowing this, Google Pay makes more sense.

Eh, it's just a way to get your existing CC information to existing payment gateways without having to re-enter it. If you have a problem you would contact the company you're trying to pay or your credit card issuer, not Google. Pretty much like Apple Pay.

Never needed customer service for Android Pay or Wallet, but Google Express has excellent customer service.

For the only Google service I pay for (Project Fi), customer service is stellar.

Surely in most cases you'd be contacting you bank for support though, not Google?

I use android pay whenever possible. I use it multiple times per month. I also use it when available in apps.

I have a credit card with an NFC chip built in. I enjoy swiping my wallet over the payment terminal and mystifying people at stores with what I just did.

Huh. I use apple pay for probably half of purchases around Phoenix.

Every morning at breakfast. Maybe other places during the day.

I use Apple Pay regularly (multiple times per month) at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Starbucks and Coffee Bean. On more rare occasions when I do end up shopping for cloths in person, I've used it at department stores.

In Canada, a lot of credit and debit cards are NFC-enabled. I discovered that the NFC-enabled payment terminals will take a payment via Apple Pay just as though it was a plastic card.

I've only seen two businesses actually advertise that they take Apple Pay, but I've used it at countless businesses that don't advertise it.

I use Apple Pay quite a bit in NYC! From my experience, most contactless NFC readers at payment terminals accept it just fine, but maybe I've been lucky. I even use it in cabs!

You're probably looking in the wrong places.

I use Apple Pay at least once per day accounting for at least 80% of my card payments. The online experience is way better than typing in card info.

I use Apple pay 3-4 times a week. Here in Canada we have contactless payments at most pay machines. The retailer doesn't need anything special for Apple Pay.

I use it every day on the London Underground. Wave my phone near the barrier and it opens.

I used it most days on holiday in Italy, whether paying for groceries or at restaurants.

There are only two things which stop me using it more often - there's a limit of £30(?) for contactless transactions, and one of my credit cards isn't supported.

If I see the contactless payment logo I'll usually reach for my phone instead of my credit card because chip readers are agonizingly slow.

Android users: did you know you can add shortcuts to specific cards to your home screen? Pretty neat even though I tend to use my default card for the vast majority of POS purchases.

As a Canadian with a NFC credit card, I was blown away at how rare they are in the US. It's funny because the devices used by most stores support them, but the clerks are always blown away when I use it.

That being said, now that I live here with a non-NFC credit card, I use Android Pay for most my payments. Tapping is far easier than swipe + sign.

America is far behind the curve compared to the rest of the world. About the only place I use Apple Pay in the US is at Starbucks. But in the UK, I literally use it for everything. Restaurants, the London tube, taxis, pubs (to pay for a round of drinks!). It's incredibly useful, and it amazes me that America is taking so long to adopt it.

Even more amazing is that the US even changed payment systems to a chip-based system just a couple of years ago, but apparently didn't mandate that everyone adopts contactless payment when updating their hardware. Foolish.

I love Apple Pay and use it all the time at the 'Giant' stores in North east US.

It replaced my credit card wherever NFC is enabled (so basically everywhere except that one noodle place). So 11 times over the last week. I'm based in Oz though, so we seem to be ahead of the US with payments.

I can pay for the bus here in Portland with it. That's pretty nice. Outside of that and McDonald's though, I haven't seen many places that support NFC.

I'm in the USA. At first I loved it, and used it often, but the main problem for me was that it's buggy as hell. 80% of the time it works, 20% of the time the merchant's terminal freaks out and I have to whip out my card anyway, so it wastes time and the people behind me in line wonder why I am trying to do some fancy thing with my phone rather than just use the card that works. After that happened about a dozen times I just stopped using it.

I use Android Pay for pretty much all in person purchases at places that have NFC payment capability.

I use Apple Pay regularly because getting my phone + doing Touch ID is faster than getting a card out of my wallet, and I tend to use it at most stores that accept it (which is usually just larger chains, I think).

I've used it a couple times to buy something from a website on my phone. That makes it handy because I don't need to fill in CC info and whatnot. But yeah I rarely use it except in that case, Walgreens, or maybe one or two other stores.

Plus bigger stores like Target still don't support it.

Every since credit cards got Chips, all chip-readers are insanely slow. I mean 5-10x slower than swiping (sometimes even longer)

I have started using Apple Pay more and more because it is so much faster than inserting my credit card into the chip reader.

US here - I use it all the time now that chip readers are widespread. Apple Pay is drastically faster than chip readers, especially when you're wearing an apple watch already.

Wholefoods and Walgreens are good for ApplePay

Chase freedom is giving 5% back in Jan-Mar this year for using Android Pay. So, I'm going to use it for at least three months.

I use Google Pay all the time, even the little hipster coffee shops in my neighborhood support NFC payments.

The only places that I go to, that I can think of at the moment, that do not accept NFC payments are:

My Employers Cafeteria

Any gas pump

7/11 (I wish they would support NFC payments)

Costco

The little grocery store on the corner (They use Square and they have not upgraded their gear yet)

Just about all restaurants

I pay for pretty much everything with Apple Pay. All of the supermarkets here in NJ accept Apple Pay. The convenience of using my watch to pay is great - and much faster than the chip card readers.

In London, I was able to use Apple Pay to pay for all of my subway and bus rides directly.

I'm in the US, and I use Apple Pay everywhere that I can, which now feels like the majority of places I shop. Still, some major chains still refuse to support it; CVS comes to mind.

Apple pay means I can just take my phone and my keys. It is great for going for a run.

When I'm in town (Cupertino area,) I use Apple Pay almost everywhere. I love it. France just recently got it, so I'm looking forward to being able to use it more.

All of my cards were contactless in 2015, I'd been doing contactless payments for 5+ years (in the few places it was possible). But then the greedy, inept, and cheap American card issuers ripped out RFID in favor of only contact EMV chip, instead of going with dual chipped cards like pretty much the rest of Europe.

And as merchants had to pay their own way to comply with the new chip requirements, they too mostly went the cheap route, which was to buy POS systems that support chip, not chip and RFID.

The reason we have contact only cards, is issuers. The reason we have chip and sign, is issuers. They want the American consumer to have as many cards as possible, and different PINs for each card discourages having a wallet of 10 cards.

I always try it because it works really well when you're somewhere it's supported but I still feel like I'm half reaching for my wallet every time I use it, just in case it fails.

My local grocery store (3min walk from my house) supports it, most coffee shops and drug stores and the like do as well. Hell, I don't even carry my wallet most days.

I got some odd looks using it in Canada and NZ but that was when apple pay was newer; I think it was about using my phone, not about contactless.

Why would you use contactless payment when phone manufacturers actively withhold NFC functionality from their phones costing below $400 (in the US)? If they wanted wide adoption they wouldn't do that.

In California. Most of my POS transactions use Apple Pay. It's much faster than the chip. Of the businesses I visit routinely, I only pull out my wallet at restaurants, Target, and one of three local grocers.

i no longer carry a wallet in Australia. everywhere i go, everyone accepts apple pay (or android pay or whatever its called now) - from supermarkets to small coffee merchants to thrift stores to even the local markets on a weekend. Having also lived in america for 2 years also, there is a big disparity between american and the rest of the world.

*edit: spelling

I use Apple Pay everyday with my watch. Used it all over the UK when I was there. My favorite Apple tech to date.

I'm in Australia and don't carry a wallet around anymore.

Apple Pay has my VISA & Amex in it. I live in Sydney and I would say 95% of merchants who accept credit card have terminals which support contact-less payments. I have found this to be such a great implementation of technology.

My VISA card was ripped off when buying something online (not using Apple Pay) and my bank was able to cancel that card and push a new card to my phone pretty much within minutes. My Apple Pay experience had effectively zero downtime while I waited a few days for a new CC to be mailed to me.

I wind up using Android Pay about once a month, but primarily because it also holds loyalty cards. I only EVER use Android pay for payment when there's also a loyalty card relevant, because otherwise I forget. I forget because so few places I shop seem to even take NFC payments, and half the devices that say they do don't work.

I use Apple Pay every chance I get. I'm not a big shopper, but I use it probably 3 to 4 times a month. I use it because it's faster than chip and signature, and more secure.

(edit: I'm in the U.S.)

[I'm an Apple engineer, but not working in, or speaking for, that department]

Apple Pay is great when it works, and it's my default method of payment. I rarely use it on the phone, but I love using it on the Apple Watch. It's rare enough that I still get double takes from vendors all around the world.

In the US, lots of credit cards are compatible with Apple pay, but contactless POS are still rare, and occasionally they get disabled (IIRC Walgreens disabled theirs for a while).

In Europe, the problem is the opposite: Contactless POS are ubiquitous, but in many countries, only niche CC providers support Apple pay. This is not too dissimilar from carrier support in the early years of iPhone, though, and I can see the situation improving over time.

(I work for Google payments, opinions are my own)

I believe this process has been improved in the last year to more easily change your country. I'm not sure when you went through it, but understand that it can be a complicated problems due to different regulations for payment related activity and digital goods. Like some countries Google is required to verify your tax id with the government to even buy 99 cent app.

I'm in the same boat but in reverse having moved from the US to the UK. The worst part is most banks restrict their app downloads to the country they are located in. So I have to decide whether I want my US banking apps on my phone or my UK banking apps.

There is probably a lack of executive tlc to go around for all their stuff. I don't get it either, they break things that work already -- I simply cannot trust anything they put out that isn't search/Android/Google AI stuff anymore. Wasn't there some heuristic that a large company can only have 3 strategic priorities? Guess these 3 are it.

> Why did Google cut Android Pay out of Wallet if they were just going to do this?

They didn't. Android Pay was a renamed of an acquisition that was originally planned to be integrated with Wallet but wasn't (well, until now), it just looked like it was cut out of Wallet because they killed Waller’s similar NFC payment functionality. From the fact that they now for a while have had “pay with Google” that can use cards from Wallet, Android Pay, and some other superficially siloed single-app payment systems at Google, I would assume they’ve actually finally integrated everything to use the same infrastructure as Android Pay, so now the siloes can go away.

More like each newly turned over product team always makes a https://xkcd.com/927/ decision, and only gets 80% through to completion before the next batch decides to do-over yet again.

and now there are n+1 payment options

I'm not sure they've recognized anything. They go through this consolidate-branch cycle pretty regularly with so many of their products.

G Pay is not a bank, it's payment processor like Stripe. They don't hold any money. Though you are right that this gives them information about what you're purchasing.

Except I would trust Stripe a thousand times more than Google.

Edit: trust them not to cross reference me to hell and track my every move. Security would be as good on either side.

They could also take on Square by moving the "confirm, sign, tip, send receipt" aspect of Square (basically the entire interface) to the phone anywhere there is a payment system that takes tap to pay which more and more is basically everywhere. Unfortunately google doesn't agree and the actual payment experience is so shitty and limited it is a joke.

Sounds like a China problem.

You can hide the sticky footer by clicking at the button. The header hides itself when you scroll down.

I think frontend designers should design with a 13" laptop and NO ADITIONAL MONITORS... only the laptop screen.

Then you wouldn't see more designs like this one.

what lightning network?

You ready to deal with paying capital gains tax every time you purchase something?