Google's history with their payment apps/platform is almost as convoluted as their history with message apps/platforms.
I swear they have gone back and forth on Android Pay/Google Wallet/Google Pay a half dozen times.
I swear they have gone back and forth on Android Pay/Google Wallet/Google Pay a half dozen times.
In particular, Google wanted it to be successful in India.
But the prior app was designed with USA sensibilities and requirements. Such as, oh, requiring an email and Google account! The thought was that this wouldn't fly in India, and it had to work with just a phone number.
I'm sure there were perverse/crossed incentives on delivery deadlines that lead the leadership team to decide that completely breaking the existing flow/splitting the userbase was the way forward.
[1] Perhaps this Ars Technica article from 2022: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-wallet-rolls-...
In India, Google pay is a client for the UPI platform. You could send money from Google pay to Whatsapp pay for example.
As a part of that initiative you had manufacturers building super low-cost Android smartphones that came preloaded with Google apps and people could put a SIM card in. The backing system of GPay in India called UPI works similarly so this app could never have that second layer of auth as a mandatory wrapper and spread where Google wanted it to spread.
Those decisions gave them 200M users on the app in the country.
Google does not mess around with adherence to "naming things is hard."
It all goes full circle!
Seriously though, they need to roll improvements into what they're already shipping and stop invented the wheel 20 times over.
Now, among other things, every time I need to open the app, I inevitably search for Google Pay instead of Wallet.
Maybe I'll remember now that this happened.
Android Pay -> Google Pay seemed fair, but IIRC, Google Pay -> Google Wallet was just a combo of shipping-the-org-chart and Apple me-too'ing.
At the time, they were also leaking that there was going to be a Google credit card / true bank account launched, because Apple had just done that. [^1]
There was no greater force internally than Apple. I swear the only thing 90% of leads _actually_ wanted to get done was something close enough to last year's Apple announcements that they could say it with a straight face.
[^1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-is-scrapping-its-plan-to...
I’m sure you’re right but this sounds like a dark joke from outside given how many people I know who stopped using Google products due to the kind of churn Apple avoids. A decade ago my friends & coworkers favored Google for messaging and payment but the iOS users also used iMessage and Apple Pay. Today we use those services even more but even the Android loyalists stopped following Google’s migrations about 5 years ago and we switched to Signal and Venmo for cross-platform use. Periodically we’ll speculate about whether there is yet a “next person to tell users they need to install a new app is fired” policy yet.
- you add 80% of what Apple does, every year[^1]
- every year, you put the same clique on this year's Apple project
- that clique is formed by overworking, without complaint, to work around a complete lack of interest in planning / conversation
- only interact with and reward that clique (after all, they're working on the priority project this year, and focus is good)
- rinse, lather, repeat, for 7 years.
You'll find:
- you have 20% of what Apple actually built (80% ^ 7 years)
- your new management layer punches down, because they've always had right of first refusal on any work
- your new management layer also has 0 interest in planning
- your new management layer believes any interest in planning is a form of aggression and/or whining ('thrive in ambiguity!')
- nothing gets done except this year's Apple project
- you don't have anyone to nurture and sustain quality
- any initiative to repair anything requires a new team adjacent to the actual team, a fresh start, and a rebrand
I wish Pixel enough longevity that it gets terraformed[^2].
[^1] I believe that's _very_ generous, my figure is 60%.
[^2] Orgs that aren't as public facing and broken go through an elongated, silent, process where the leads 2 levels up leave in a bunch, then steadily 80% of line management is replaced with people in dress shirts from Motorola/Qualcomm/Google Search, and about 50% of grunts churn. Over 2-3 years.
There was a collaboration (grant?) with Ross Anderson's team in Cambridge on secure NFC payments. Android supported those in 2013, but, of course, carriers had control of the secure element, so everything got derailed, to the point that Google tried desperate workarounds such as HCE, without luck. As we have all seen, tap to pay was actually invented by Apple in 2014.
So, yeah, things were even crazier and more complicated than you recall, but it wasn't always the case that people were copying Apple.
You're right, it wasn't just a Google credit card, I was referring specifically to this[^1], in 2020: Apple Card was announced as 'Apple is your bank'. (the article in my previous comment is the sunsetting of this rumor)
[^1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/17/21225276/google-apple-car...
The first culprit that comes to mind is swipe to the camera on the lockscreen - useful, but not Apple enough, so they delete it. Then, Apple ships it, but Google already deleted it.
Google Pay India is very successful. Not because it is actually good but rather the fact that it does not face the pressure to be very profitable unlike its competitors like PayTM (which now is pretty much dead). It is a good product with basic feature that work (despite being somewhat slow app) most of the times. Google is not aggressive in trying to sell their users crappy fintech products or peddling gambling apps and other scammy offers. The fact that Google is slow turned out to be good for them.
At some point Google VP Ceasar Sengupta decided to shut down some unit and create Gpay Us app. His weird slogan for this was "Time of technology in finance is now" as if this guy was living under some rock for last 10 years. Then all engineers under the shut down unit were moved to this Gpay Us app project. For many of us this was an opportunity to get promoted by claiming "launch impact" so no one complained.
The problems here were engineering. Google decided that they will share the codebase and practices with Google India app which was built in flutter. The people who built it were pretty third rate snobs and treated this codebase as their own little empire. They saw this as an opportunity to get promoted again. These morons then created needless processes to harass gpay us team. Things like if you want to add a new page in the app create a doc first with the same code in the Google doc so it can be reviewed in Google doc first. Then write real code. As a new person in Google I thought may be this is how the company rolls.
Weeks passed and absolutely no code was submitted because the Singapore team would not approve any CL. Also most CL comments were about shaving the yak e.g. "Create a feature flag" for this page which does not even have an entry point yet. You create a feature flag and another engineer comments that feature flag is not needed since page does not have an entry point yet. For some weird unknown reason (I think DEI points for promo) the app has crazy focus on accessibility (not with intention to make product better for others but for the sake of engineering complexity) which means everytime you changed something it would create like 100 screenshots that needed to be reviewed manually which led to wild goose chases. For example you change a button color and someone else comments that the top bar does not look good (though not related the CL).
At that point it was clear to me that everyone is focused on promotions and no one gives shit about the product or users. The app was launched and soon the VP and most of the leadership left (or may be asked to quit) along with most of the senior engineers who then created "https://artafinance.com/". I suspect these people were denied promo and went sour and quit.
After that I left the team pretty quickly and heard the same horror stories of how rolling out one feature like say changing a button color would require around 15 primary approvals. There were concepts like "small council" meeting and "large council" meetings to review stuff and even after some shitty small feature was launched there were like 2 separate teams reviewing "analytics". The numbers were so tiny that some of my personal apps have more users and more activity than this Gpay US app.
Luckily I learned the game of how to get promoted at Google by cynical, launching stuff no one needs and by helping others with their own promotion goals.
It was natural for OPs team to have pushback since they have no knowledge of what works in India even if the entire app was developed in the US by a different team. The fact that Google culture that makes it so easy to do said pushback was just icing on the cake.
There is no "offshore" involved. Google Pay India's team was primarily based on Singapore (and some India) working for Google Singapore and Google India. Google US app's team was spread all around the world but mostly USA and Singapore.