Nobody in technology, at least in the USA, seems to be able to make the marketing for their "payment things" understandable. On the Google side, there is (or was) Google Wallet (OG), Android Pay, Google Pay, gPay, now Google Wallet (new). I don't know which one I should be using, or what each one deliberately can't do. Some handset makers have their own apps: Samsung Pay, for example. Then, there's the individual apps: Venmo, PayPal, Square Cash, Zelle, Xoom...
A web search shows there are probably a dozen more, all incompatible with each other. It's like VHS vs Betamax and HD-DVD vs. BluRay all over again, but instead with 20 different formats. How has this industry so royally fucked up something that should be pretty straightforward?
Anything that can be represented in a barcode or QR code can be stored in it. Which of course turns out to be a lot of things, payments are just one part of it.
Edit: added link, but it's preinstalled on most modern Android devices.
My experience with managing boarding passes in Android is absolutely abysmal because Android does not support pkpass (the format Apple uses).
If an airliner is only making boarding passes available in pkpass, then ask your airliner to support more than just Apple devices. The one I flew with at the weekend "just worked".
I didn't know about this stuff before your comment as I've not yet encountered a pkpass formatted digital file. But I do see that there are conversion apps available if I did give across them. I'm just not surprised Google wouldn't adopt a non standard format.
It literally "just worked". It was intuitive too... I'd not seen it before and knew where to find everything.
I hadn't seen the functionality before (but haven't travelled in ages), and everything I would reasonably hope for from it was there working flawlessly. Even this morning when I looked at it I see it's moved into the "Expired passes" section as I would expect from a flight in the past.
Similar for the COVID pass in Google Pay... it was accepted at KubeCon, it was accepted at the Canadian border, it was accepted at the Spain border. Everything "just worked".
Google Wallet is likely fully implemented in the Google Pay app today, and the change is going to be a rebranding just to let people know you can do more than just pay for things. I don't work for Google or hold shares, all of this stuff is just me using the product as a user... it all works great for me, YMMV etc.
Let's see if wallet changes this.
That's overly paranoid, and the defensiveness leads to self-defeat.
There's no incentive for Apple to change the spec confrontationally like that, especially if more people use it. People will stop buying or using their products.
From my perspective, no-one's using this ticketing spec any more because of this fear. You have to download apps for all the services you want and view your tickets/passes/cards in those apps. Very view companies export just the card/ticket without an app (when some of them started out doing this), and increasingly they just keep the ticket in their app. The only thing that seems to consistently work for more than a couple of years are my bank cards - presumably because I can pay with contactless.
Those services which have given up using Wallet are now harder to use and less appealing. They create friction and dissatisfaction with every transaction. And now I don't trust Apple Wallet any more (in terms of being useful). I actually feel freer to leave the Apple ecosystem now than I ever have done because nothing works as well as promised. (The two things keeping me with Apple are not Apple benefits, but Google's failings: surveillance based business model and that their ecosystem looks worse still).
And I'd get the same reply I get when I ask for an upgrade.
I think it was announced at Google IO a week or two ago.
Because... money? Venmo built up the biggest user base and was subsequently bought out by PayPal for big bucks. Zelle was a major initiative by the banks themselves, but too late, I suppose, to sway the habits of the consumers themselves. There was also SquareCash, but they were also too late into the game, particularly because they had no institutional support behind them like Zelle. Lastly, Apple Cash, while particularly convenient, IMHO just did not advertise it well enough. Also, being limited to Apple devices only, kinda misses the point of making payments easy, since you can't be expected to always remember/check which device does your payee have.
Most other service you mentioned were just regular payment processing intermediaries, not p2p solutions like Venmo/Squarecash/Apple Cash.
It's a mess indeed, but at the end of the day, from my experience, Venmo in the US still is the go-to method, seconded only by Zelle.
That's how a client-server model works, definitely not p2p.
I have no clue how Venmo or Zelle work though, so I don't have an answer to your latter question.
Next time I’ll just use the bill pay and make the bank eat the cost of a stamp.
And as such, the p2p ecosystems differentiate themselves by giving people ways to pay merchants without explicitly needing to move that money out of the network. So, Cash App issued a debit card, and then PayPal, and then Venmo (yep, even though it's a subsidiary, it's a separate card). And then some of them started using real bank accounts (with routing/account numbers) to back the stored balance. And the result today is that all these p2p apps look awfully a lot like banks, but less encumbered by regulations because they don't do everything that banks do.
Back to your question, why bother changing to Venmo (or Cash App) when PayPal is basically the same at this point? Obviously, the primary reason would be if everyone you know is using not-PayPal. A secondary reason is the same reason that people have different credit cards from different banks: different rewards schemes (yep, there are incentives for using those p2p debit cards).
Zelle is probably the odd one out here, because it's just an extra thing built on top of existing participating banks that already have all these ways of moving money out of their networks. It's effectively a wire transfer replacement without the fee (or a physical check replacement without the check-writing).
(Disclosure: am employed by a company that has a p2p product.)
Where Venmo wins with Zelle and PayPal is the privacy: you don’t have to hand out your email address or phone number — you’re payee only knows your handle.
They don't just look, they are banks (or has a bank they outsource the regulated activity to). This is a piece they're not too keen on disclosing, except in very tiny print, as they wouldn't like their user to realize they can go and complain to the regulator regulating their companies when they leave their customers high and dry.
Here's some data from Google: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Still leaves Google', Apple's or Facebook's solutions in the dust.
I guess it's luck that some countries happened to get the banks to agree to something like this at the particular time when the technology needed to support it just had matured (in Sweden a government supported e-ID had just become prevalent), and then it's kind of difficult for them to pull out and say "now everybody should pay for it".
Here you can pay with Swish in most stores as well, but the prevalent payment method there is still mastercard/visa I think.
I’ve used it to transfer money to family, but friends sometimes use Venmo, Cash App, or others. I don’t think it ever gained critical mass.
In Singapore there’s also PayNow/PayLah
Even if I had been able to get a personnumber getting a BankID would have also been a real hassle - by law I believe Swedish banks have to grant me an account if I reside there and have a personnumber but as a US citizen they go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible due to the extremely onerous requirements that US requires foreign bank accounts comply with.
You'll run into issues trying to open an account for trading stocks though.
I'm a citizen and have a personnummer, but because I'm not a resident I'm not in SPAR. But I need to be neither in SPAR nor a resident for BankID or Swish.
I even managed to pick up a parcel my saying my personnummer, when they couldn't scan it off of my British driving license.
> How has this industry so royally fucked up something that should be pretty straightforward?
There has been a constant trend throughout history minimize plebian agency and power. For a few decades after WWII the common citizen gained agency and now corporations and governments alike are clawing it back.
If you ever have to ask this in America, the answer is almost always corporations and lobbying.
Which makes it all a major cluster f. Same thing happened to messaging.
Don't forget Fitbit Pay! (As Google apparently did)
- Apple Pay is a method to pay using the payment cards in your Wallet in stores and online that is supported by many credit/debit cards
- Apple Card is a MasterCard credit card
- Apple Cash is an bank account with a VISA debit card. This is inline with other similar services like the popular "Cash app"
Compared to other confusing naming schemes (Apple TV/+, and absolutely anything Google does) this seems pretty straightforward to me.
(Also a neat part of a virtual card: checking in the Apple Wallet I can see that the card already switched numbers/networks for me. I don't need to wait for a replacement card. If not for this comment I wouldn't have even thought to check if it had switched, just transparent in the background. I probably got an email on it I ignored if I had wanted to know sooner, but there are so many emails.)
So Apple Pay is the service, Apple Card is their credit card and Apple Cash is their debit card via some bank. You can sidestep all that and just put your own credit card in the Wallet and use some other cash-like service.
The large problem with a lot of these cash-like services is in order for the exchange to happen, two people have to be on the same service. If Apple Cash takes off, then you just need to know if your friend has an iPhone and then its viable and much easier than having to go signup for one of these other services (zelle, cash app, venmo, etc.) just to chip in for a gift or dinner.
You can. In fact, if you're using Apple Card, the cash-back rewards show up as Apple Cash.
They are not. Apple Cash does not require the user to have an Apple Card.
Apple TV - app on various platforms (that offers the subscription service, and sometimes acts as a container for other services plus replaces the old iTunes Movie Store which also sold TV shows)
Apple TV+ - subscription service
tvOS - operating system (but most consumers will never have heard of this)
(Some confusion here is that you can have a separate Apple Store/iTunes credit that isn't Apple Cash and doesn't show up as a card in the Apple Wallet and can only be spent in the Apple Store/iTunes. Given the nature of how gift cards work that's likely to remain a separate "cash fund" and the two separate balances may always be a little confusing, with some people likely putting money into one when they meant to put it into the other. Hopefully Apple may find a good way to communicate the differences between them.)
It's also a virtual debit card, so you can spend or transfer the money, but it seems the its raison d'être is p2p payments.
Pay is the whole system of APIs used to pay via NFC or online, authed by biometrics (Touch/FaceID). As a user you just add your credit card and it works better than contactless credit cards.
Apple Card is an Apple credit card with cashback backed by Goldman Sachs. US-only.
(Remember Apple once tried to trademark App)