Google Pay reimagined: pay, save, manage expenses and more | Hacker News Reader

Google Pay reimagined: pay, save, manage expenses and more

blog.google

112 pointsmuhammadusman124 comments

I see that they've added integrated chat. If Google would've had a coherent chat app strategy they could've integrated it there, but I guess separate chats in every app is almost as good.

There's no chance I'd use a service like this from Google by the way. I would probably had been interested if it had come from Google 15 years ago, but they have too much badwill since then, with all their cancelled services and stories of banned accounts.

Nailed it. Why would I use this over cashapp or venmo?

Well, Venmo is owned by PayPal. So there's that. Also US only I believe.

What's the argument here vs. paypal?

This appears to include an API to bank accounts, so perhaps it's trying to compete with companies like Starling or Monzo. If it can disrupt the paleolithic US consumer banking industry it might end up being a net positive.

Google's brand has become synonymous with privacy violation.

Their services are designed to suck everything knowable about you like an information vampire.

This should not be seen as chats, but transaction documentation.

The dialogs associated with informal or semi-formal transactions may not belong in your personal chat space; quite often that set of dialogs exists only before and during the transactions and never after that.

> ..but they have too much badwill since then..

Google pay is the market leader in India in fintech. It is perhaps most trusted brand. The notion of "Google is evil", "Kills of products so would not use its services" only exist in HN bubble, if we leave this space and go to emerging markets Google absolutely rules.

>> if we leave this space and go to emerging markets Google absolutely rules

I can understand why! Google services are free, or free-ish, and work extremely well!

Do you think sudden account bans with no recourse are something to be concerned about, or is it a lightning-strike-rare kind of situation: happens, but does not bear worrying about?

I think they're both a rare lightning event, and something that people in emerging markets are probably more used to happening from other sources.

I remember a while ago there was an outbreak of news reports of people being wrongly declared dead in India, which gave them all manner of bureaucratic trouble. I don't know if Aardhar has made that better or worse.

a huge chunk of Indian internet users have got access to internet only in the last 5 years or so, and almost all of them are digitally illiterate. Internet basically means, Facebook, Whatsapp, Tiktok, and Google. I know abundance of users who made a gmail account, just to get started with their android phone and do not understand what email even is.

I was thinking of the same. Tying critical services to a Google account feels like walking with some nitroglycerin in your pocket. Accounts get banned with no recourse and there's no law or regulation holding Google accountable yet.

The court of public opinion is not a real deterrent especially for a company with such power to shape it, to the point where the only way to even be aware of what they're doing is to be very tech-educated and interested in the particular topic.

Indian version of the Google Pay even has games. They have beautifully gamified the payments services.

BTW chat is really useful feature in P2P payments.

check out the Indian version of Google Pay.

Booted the new GPay app on my Android phone this morning.

"Sorry, Enterprise accounts are not supported on Google Pay."

I've been doing NFC payments through Google Pay for years with the current Google Pay app, so this is kind of a surprise.

Also, I do not have an "Enterprise account." I have a GAFYD account from around 2006. Over time Google's turned it into some limited bullshit account, and at this point I'd pay them just to turn all that shit off and turn me into a regular Google account -- or just close the damn thing down if I could transfer all the stuff I've purchased, which Google won't allow me to do.

My fault for trusting Google, but the landscape was way different in 2006.

I'm in the same situation. This used to happen often, years ago when they first introduced GAFYD, and I haven't had an issue in a long time. But looks like things are reverting back now.

I've been having issues for a while.

Couldn't sign up for Youtube TV with my main account. I could sign up for Google Play Music (formerly Google Music, now RIP) but I couldn't sign up for a family account.

Stuff like that. It gets frustrating after a while.

What the hell, I just tried this and it turns out to be true. Sometimes I think I should go work for google for a year just so I could rage internally about this sort of shit. I too have a GAFYD account I've been paying for since 2009.

(Googler here, opinions are my own)

People do rage internally about this. Unsurprisingly, a lot of current Google employees were early adopters of new Google features.

What's the case for not allowing these accounts? What do people reply internally?

Don't know, but probably there's some arbitrary legal complications associated to personal accounts so their lawyers simply decided to put those accounts into the "enterprise" category to avoid all the messes and now we're seeing collateral damages from this short-sighted decision.

Google apps for your domain is handled by the GSuite team. All their accounts have various extra requirements, like legal checks, not randomly adding features without consulting the admin, having different sets of servers for some services, having different treatment of private data (since the domain admin must be able to have some control over it) etc.

Some product teams within Google don't like all the extra overhead, paperwork, and complexity that adds, so instead they just block all enterprise accounts.

I'm so intrigued by you having an account since 2011 and this is only your 5th comment.

They may have another account they use when not speaking as a googler

Nope, this is my only account (assuming you can trust anything I say). I signed up a while back when I was founding a startup company (because of course every founder needs to be on HN), but then stopped coming here after the startup disintegrated. I've started coming back after I got bored going to r/programming during long compiles.

That makes it even more entertaining that they end up railing against the same poor google product policies. Does nobody ever collar a product manager in the hallway?

Said managers are very good at saying "I'm afraid it isn't a priority for our team at the moment".

Google also refuses to Add my G Suite Basic account into YouTube Premium family sharing. Annoying.

For a long time I wanted to give Google more money! I tried multiple times to get together a Google Music Family Plan, because I'd bought music and uploaded music and the radio feature was so good.

They refused to allow me to pay them more, and refused to allow me to transfer my purchases to another account I verifiably own so I could then pay them more.

I know legacy GAFYD accounts don't matter to Google, and I don't expect them to, but it'd be nice to be able to transfer my stuff out. I know we like to point out who Google's real customers are, but after a decade-and-a-half I've actually paid them real money for things, and shockingly would like to continue doing so.

Same here. I can’t transition my Nest to my Google accounts for the same reason.

Hey, glad I'm not alone!

Can't use business calendars on my google home (so switched to Alexa which DOES support them oddly despite whatever mumbo jumbo google says).

Can't share home setup to my wife.

A variety of family sharing issues.

I mean, your evangalists (in addition to an actual business domain with big bucks I pay for gsuite for myself for little bucks) are locked out.

It really brings home how google never actually finishes / gets the final 10-20% done and working, stuff just goes to zombieland.

Google already has too much info from email, location tracking, and search history.

Getting into bank accounts is too much. It would let them know exactly how effective advertising is since they would see how money is spent and they already know what advertisements they show you.

Sorry, but no. Hard pass from me.

They say your transaction history with Google Pay won't be used in other Google services. How much you trust that is up to you.

They said the same thing about DoubleClick and YouTube. The amount of trust you should give to Google's words is zero.

Did they though? Do you have a link for us?

It is too tempting for Google to pass up.

It is only change in "terms of service" away after enough people are using it.

The Google Rewards app is always wanting a photo of receipts when I pay with a credit card. Why would this be any different, especially when they would have access to the data so easily?

not at the beginning, but they reserve the right to change their TOS anytime.

And you will know when that happens and then you can stop using the service.

Or, we can refuse to play Charlie Brown + Lucy with the football entirely.

True yet just today I got a notice of terms changing effective ... Today, November 18th.

So one might only have hours to react before implicitly agreeing by failing to opt out or cancel. Perhaps even less of the change in terms is effective immediately.

But yet they will still have all your data

I seem to remember them saying the same thing after the Nest acquisition in 2014 (“Nest data will stay with Nest”) but that didn’t last long.

https://archive.is/Aue14

Hence the hard pass. It's not like they are providing it for free and need to make money somehow.

"Do the right thing."

Unpopular opinion here:

I do want an entity I trust at a given time (eg. Google, Apple, some credit union, etc.) to mine the raw data they have on my account and do something useful with it as long as neither the raw data nor the derived one is shared with other third parties.

My idea of something useful here isn't ads per se but currently I see ads for Google Fi in Gmail even though I'm a subscriber. That's pretty dumb

With all the horror stories I've heard of them shutting down peoples' accounts with no explanation, recourse, or way to recover their contents, I have to agree.

Yeah, when a normal bank closes your account, you can open one at another bank.

Google closes your bank account, you potentially lose your email, passwords, contacts, documents...

To take this comparison further: you still need to transfer your assets out of the first bank, otherwise you lose all of that. Similarly you would need to get your digital assets out of Google, using Takeout. But not sure if Takeout is a service you can access when Google Account is locked, if not, it should be.

You need more than takeout. There should be a grace period when you're allowed to switch your accounts that rely on the Gmail address before they kill it. Maybe at first they could block only the sending of emails so you could still receive confirmation emails.

By the way, why is closing an account a practice instead of closing just the sending of emails?

When was the last such horror story you heard? (and I specifically mean shutting down access to Google Account and all services)

Last time I heard this type of story was back in Google+ times when it was trying to enforce some silly real name policy.

Here are some, published just a couple weeks ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-afte...

Several of these stories have appeared on HN just over the past year or so as well.

Edit: The amount of downvoting on this and my original comment is puzzling to me. If someone who takes issue with it would care to explain what the problem is, I'd sincerely like to hear about it.

Upvoted -- thank you for the link to recent incidents.

As far as I know credit card companies have always sold transaction history - Google must surely be buyers of that data already. I’m sure this is intended to make that data flow more direct for them though, and easier to link it to a Google account this way.

> Google must surely be buyers of that data already

Yes, they are: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...

Brynn Bardacke (Google Pay Senior Director) stated publicly that:

1) Google Pay will never sell your information.

2) Specifically, Google Pay will never sell your transaction history to third parties

3) Or share it with the rest of Google for targeting ads.

Source: https://youtu.be/A2hL32k7Y0I?t=934

You still trust Google?

I'm just providing facts, with source. The above post contains no opinion.

I'm not sure why you assume anything about my trust with Google?

It may be a fact that the Google spokeperson said that, but parroting it without any context does seem to imply you have trust in Google. I don’t think that’s an unfair take on what you posted. Google has eroded a ton of trust over the years so to emphasize (with your italics) a public statement does seem to brush over the lack of credibility of the source you’re repeating.

Unless you add a Mastercard to your Google Pay account, because Google purchases Mastercard data directly for ad targeting purposes.

So he's being very misleading here, likely deliberately. They don't directly share it with the rest of Google, but indirectly your Google Pay data is still laundered through shady Mastercard deals to Google's ad behemoth anyway.

Google Pay -> Data laundered through Mastercard -> Google Ads

Remember Palmer Luckey saying that Oculus would never require a facebook account?

Fool me once, fool me twice, ...

Before trusting them with your financial data, just remember the long list of broken promises they did before!

for example: * Gmail that was supposed to be unlimited for free for ever until they reached dominance; * same with google photo unlimited storage; * Google music that suggested you upload all your musique; * Android that is more and more closed and limited years after years; * The Google cars secretly collecting wifi data * The "don't be evil" not annoyed to create a censured search engine for China * The geolocation data that was deceptively recorded and kept, and provided to the police for geofencing for the US * The company that closes and blocks accounts for futile reasons without any 'human' support if don't have social media fame.

After watching them create so many services and cancel them (including my Google Pay card) I've bought an iPhone and this sort of integration exists already built-in and I don't feel like I'm having my transactions creeped on. There's a bunch of other reasons why I've ditched Google but since we're discussing this, this is one of the main ones. I am likely going to ditch my gmail for iCloud as well.

They say never, which seems pretty categorical to me.

> Google Pay will never sell your data to third parties or share your transaction history with the rest of Google for targeting ads.

So they will give the data to a third party for free or in a non-monetary exchange? Say data swaps with Mastercard and Visa? Or hand off the data without the constraints to a subsidiary?

Needs to be a little more categorical.

Just like google promised your unlimited photos would be free for life?

Google’s promises are worth shit.

Did Google promise that? I thought that was only for Pixel devices until Pixel 3.

Disc: Googler.

(Googler, opinions are my own. I also work on backend payment systems there). Also, this is a copy/paste from the other thread that never hit the front-page.

A fun technical piece here is that this expands on the Google Pay for India app, which is built on Flutter for android and iOS[0]. As well, it's great to see Plex (bank accounts) officially announced, though it was talked about ~1 year ago here[1].

[0] https://developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/google-pay-picks-f...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21523335

(Googler, opinions are my own. I work in Cloud)

I've been using the new pay app, linked with my personal account on Simple, and have been stunned with how well it determines what businesses I'm paying.

Splitting bills is nice too :P

Simpleton working on the Android client here. You guys did a decent job! The Plaid flow is a little quirky, but it's like that for us as well.

Those screenshots already showcase inline harassments like "Target 5% cashback deal expiring soon!" Hurry up and shop!

What a spoiled opportunity. Google could have done something really innovative and useful here, but it smells like just another advertising channel to me.

No thank you.

I really admire Google, but they have become notorious for their “fast fail” mentality and product sun setting.

No matter how good this may be I don’t trust google to not close this down or make major modifications that could cause issues in 1,3,5+ years from now.

So it’s a reluctant “no thanks” from me, as I really wish they would plan their product portfolio more long term than history so far demonstrates.

Feel a bit sorry for the authors of Plex Media streaming software who woke up today to discover that their SEO is now ruined, and trademarks worthless.

This is in relation to banking, so I imagine searching "plex media" will still show plex.tv next year or will show up under Google Pay's 'Plex' like pandora currently does[0].

0: https://goo.gl/search/pandora

You live by the short name, you die by the short name. Trademarks protect against consumer confusion. I'm not sure there would be much confusion here.

both are digital services both have accounts you can manage on your device

Yes different services, but there is significant chance of confusion. "login with your plex account".

A Googler already said "Plex (bank accounts)" in the comments here, I think that's going to be its unofficial name. Google Pay doesn't show up if you search for "Plex" on the Play Store!

> Plex Account

I already have a Plex Account. What is my Plex Account's app name? Plex or Google Pay?

Googler, opinions are my own.

Google Plex I think is the official name, but it looks to be tied specifically to Google Pay. The code name that WSJ talks about is "cache", so Plex is the real name. But as the app shows, you would get a "Citi Plex Account".

Naming is hard.

>That’s why we’re working with trusted financial institutions to create Plex, a new mobile-first bank account integrated into Google Pay.

Plex is already a product.

Are you talking about the video broadcast app?

Yes.

https://i.imgur.com/8aczvjV.png

Completely different products. Not sure how it becomes confusing.

> Plex is already a product.

As long as Google controls your search results, it doesn’t have to be so.

Maybe tomorrow or a month from now Plex as we all know it (because they didn’t cancel their product 5 times the last 10 years) won’t exist in a meaningful way in your Google search results.

Nothing close to a bank account. It's completely normal for products in different industries to have the same name.

I use Google Pay for touchless payments with my phone. I like it for that. I use other solutions for tracking spending and organizing finances.

If these features help somebody gain personal insights or build some financial literacy, I view that as a good thing.

There's going to be a lot of competition around CBDC/FedCoin wallet apps in 2021. With this update, Google Pay might be positioning themselves.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-brainard-idUSKBN1...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/357...

Why 2021? The Fed moves pretty slowly.

The legislation you linked has not passed the House or Senate (it doesnt appear to even have been voted on).

If you are on an iphone 12 the difference between native apps (liquid smooth so far in my experience - basically perfect) and flutter apps is striking!

Get ready for JANK on iOS. Or maybe just me. Flutter looks cool, but they really should make iOS a first class target platform at some point.

This could be solved simply... When the UX designers make a mockup of an app, instead of making mock screenshots, make mock videos.

Then tell the software engineer to match those mocks.

If some animation drops three frames at the start, then the code doesn't meet the mocks, and isn't ready to ship.

In 2020, a simple app like this shouldn't be janky in the first place.

If software engineers, at Google no less, need a mock video to understand that the UI should be smooth, then there's a big problem.

Oh, so I wasn't imagining UI stuttering on my iPhone 11 with the new app.

I've never seen that in any other app for that matter... Is Google using Flutter in their other apps as well?

It weird, because Apple really has prioritized smooth animations (on iphone 12 at least it really feels VERY smooth). Why not at least match them - they've demonstrated I think reasonably that people value stuff like this.

The power of the chips in these little things is insane, I also don't understand how my old Windows 3.11 machine had less stutter than these new things.

On a fairly unrelated note, the link shortener situation at Google is all over the place. When you refer people to Google Pay, the link is shortened to "g.co/payinvite/<code>", google images sharing goes to "images.app.goo.gl", google search is "g.co/kgs", and Google Pay profile sharing is "gpay.app.goo.gl".

Don't worry - there's probably three different teams working on competing link shorteners...

Don't forget the internal ones that occasionally leak into external support articles... shortn/, go/, and goto.corp.google.com/... And maybe more I haven't seen...

The UI seems quite slow. When changing tabs or scrolling there is a noticeable delay. Feels about 60% like a native app.

I noticed someone in this thread say its built with Flutter which is cool to see! Hopefully it can compete with native sometime soon.. in the meantime this isn't there yet

Edit: Testing on iOS right now

There's a big Flutter issue (since May) with jank on iOS - https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/32170, personally can't wait for this one to be resolved.

Definitely cool! Theres only a very few things that they need to introduce, you guys prob know what it is. Once they do that, a lof of competitors will definitely start sweating...

I love my apple card, but kinda gets annoying on days when i have to switch to an android

You want to run all your purchases through a system run by an advertising company? There's no way I would do that.

Neat concept but I've been burned too many times already by Google killing or deprecating products.

A Google ban would be immediately devastating to me, but I would certainly recover over time. I could weather losing family photos, 15 years of emails, calendar, not to mention countless 3rd-party services I verified with my Gmail address that I'd have to deal with.

Add financial services into the mix? Especially banking? Gah, I cannot imagine. It would wreck me. I cannot responsibly use Google Pay for anything other than paying for Google services.

Sounds like Plex is their competition to the likes of Fintech 'challenger' banks in the UK (Monzo/Starling). Wonder if they'll bring it over here.

I'll move to the Yukon before I put something as important as money in another platform controlled by a schizophrenic marketing driven company like google.

Clever. Add a UI to Google Pay, and suddenly you have a not-obviously-creepy justification for retaining and mining all payment information forever.

> Most importantly, Google Pay will never sell your data to third parties or share your transaction history with the rest of Google for targeting ads.

I seriously doubt this, but I find it interesting that they address the elephant in the room in the launch announcement.

I wonder how many other Google launches will note this as a perk before the hammer comes down from up high?

Disclaimer: I used to work at Google.

If it it written in the privacy policy or similar I would trust it. Of course that doesn't mean it will never change in the future.

The only problem with that is how googles tries to have one single privacy policy for all their products and use it in their points for services which have separate policies. :/

It's messy and often misleading for an average consumer.

Google got rid of automated Google Fi group payment splitting/management, does this add a feature that will replace that?

Start a group, tap "Split a bill", I've been using it for my Fi group for a bit now.

They have to first solve the "I'm sorry but your account has been permanently banned and you have no recourse" issue before they'll get me using it for any serious payments.

Looks like they're taking a page from Revolut's (and/or N26, whatever others) playbook.

So Google Pay is now trying to be a Facebook Relationship Graph?

I like the day of grouping money exchange this way. My current banking app only allows to sort by time. You lose track which whom you most often exchange money, which can lead to better offers.

> When using a debit card, please carry out a signature-debit transaction. Do not enter a PIN when using a debit card if you want your transaction to be applied towards your offer completion.

Can't using a chip card to receive rewards apparently.

Why not? A card having or lacking a chip is orthogonal to transactions being processed as debit or credit.

Why did they call them Plex? Come on Google! Plex is already a trademark.

A more convenient way for google to access my financial information??

No thanks, no thanks.

google is just a joke. They blocked like $5 worth of gift card and it took me like 3 month with 20-30 emails and 4 voice call to unlock it.

Google is so evil tbh.

Coming to a Google Graveyard near you in 202X.

So Googleplex?

Why does Google pay has a much smaller international availability than apple pay?

How long before this hits the Google Graveyard?

looks like a nod to venmo

...and will be sunset in 18 months

So Google finally forced my hand yesterday regarding the Google Play Music closing. I’ll be moving to Apple Music or whatever it’s called.

Like most of the other people here, I have zero faith in that company running a project for any reasonable amount of time.

All the “Googlers” here should stop hiding behind their monitors every time a bad story comes out, and show some spine once in awhile.

It’s all fun and games when a product is launched. How about you show some initiative when we tell you to quit shutting shit down. Or is that suddenly not your problem?

Great. Our last shred of privacy sold to Google for the convenience of digital payments. People, wake up!

Would you like to take payments over a system that can automatically ban you for unspecified reasons, and where there is no possibility of appealing to a human?

It’s supposed to be a social network made around money relationships. It’s like google plus all over again. Except this time with the promotion of businesses.

as someone who uses google for personal people to people communication and platform, Seeing my favorite free service provider take this route to what is unarguably a data collection scheme is deeply disheartening.

No way in hell I would let Google anywhere near my financial information, regardless of some empty promise while they're trying to get a new app off the ground.

I can't think of another brand that has managed to lose as much trust and goodwill as Google. I've gone from excited about everything they announce to working to actively remove them from my life, and encouraging others to do the same.

Die a hero or live long enough to become the villain, I suppose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com