Google Wallet moves to the cloud, opens up to all credit and debit cards | Hacker News Reader

Google Wallet moves to the cloud, opens up to all credit and debit cards

engadget.com

70 pointsmodeless29 comments

There's a bit of sleight of hand going on here, in that it seems to be a Mastercard prepaid card in the phone which just charges your transactions to other cards you have on file with Google. So you don't pay the retailer with Amex, you pay with MasterCard and the charge eventually lands on your Amex. This makes it a bit like PayPal, but we already know that PayPal prefers to draw money from your bank account rather than your credit card because it is cheaper. It will be interesting to understand how the fees are structured around all of this because it seems to me there could be 2x friction in play...

I wonder how this plays in with chargebacks & consumer protection from cards.

If Google's partner bank is a proxy between the merchant and, say, your Amex, what happens if you need to invoke a chargeback? Does Google's partner get involved and push back against Amex?

It's possible that Google is getting a percentage of the transaction fee that is paid by the merchant when the 'virtual' Google Wallet Mastercard is used, and then applying that money to the transaction fee that they have to pay to charge your American Express, etc.

Summary spam stuffed and tagged with SEO spam.

http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2012/08/use-any-credit-or...

Ironically, I posted that link immediately after we posted the announcement and it didn't get any traction. I think people like the editorialized versions better, or something.

I think HN's policy of requiring the article title be used as the submission title really hurts here. Blogspam reposts generally have snappier titles than primary sources like company blogs (even to the point of outright lying in many cases).

This is a hard problem that no social news site has solved. One idea would be to allow users to connect stories to each other through some sort of collective voting mechanism, so blogspam submissions could be linked to each other and the primary source even after they hit the homepage.

I think HN could easily solve it - they don't need anything from these sites, a moderator could just replace their URLs and it doesn't matter if the content farms don't like it - it's not like digg and reddit where their widgets made it some sort of (probably massively lopsided) traffic and link exchange.

I am so in favor of this approach. If HN wants to maintain high quality, it needs to make a commitment to primary sources and ban secondary sources.

Articles that are replies to articles should be fine, but articles that summarize other others really have to go unless they (1) do a remarkable job of shining like on the subject or (2) provide a novel viewpoint/opinion amongst the summary.

We should call seo spam summaries "spummary" or "spammary".

Any chance of being able to link Dwolla to this in the future?

For those of you who wonder why Starbucks and others continue to support their own card apps instead of PayPass/Google Wallet: credit card fees. Starbucks loads up $25 at a time, with a single $0.30 fee (or whatever they are charged), rather than having to pay $0.30 per small $3 (iced coffee, for example) transaction.

AFAIK, this still does not support phones which lack a secure element (T-Mobile US, SGSII... probably others as well). Hopefully that will come in another iteration or two.

Those phones don't have NFC anyway, which is a more realistic impediment. It's NFC-based wallet that is the real innovation here. Online payments by themselves are hardly new territory.

My AT&T HTC One X has perfectly working NFC, which I use. It does not have a secure element. Google Wallet does not work, even after being side-loaded. So no, for me at least, the real impediment is the secure element.

However, my Nexus S (on T-Mobile) does have the NFC chip and the Play Store is still reporting it as being incompatible.

Could you side-load it?

I'm planning to try. My wife's got a Galaxy Nexus on T-Mobile, so I'll install it there and see what I can do with it. Now to get it away from her for 30 minutes...

The SGSII on T-Mobile that I mentioned (T989) does have an NFC chip.

Still being blocked for users on Verizon....

I had to manually go to the google wallet page on the play store and click install before it actually updated on my phone.

I already had it installed on my phone but it wasn't detecting an update in the play store until I force re-installed it

My friend with a Verizon Galaxy Nexus who had previously sideloaded the Wallet.apk says that his Wallet application updated from the Play Store today with the new features.

There seems to be a loophole where if you have already sideloaded a version originally downloaded form the Play Store (i.e. if you extracted the apk from a rooted HSPA+ Nexus device), then you can get updates.

If you've not installed it, then the store won't let you have it.

Does this have anything to do with competing with Stripe as a payment system? The article seems to focus on the mobile aspect, so I'd assume not, but engadget focuses on consumer improvements.

They need to get WalMart, Target and some large grocery stores to gain critical mass here.

Works at Whole Foods and Peet's coffee.

When can I use my HTC One X as a replacement for my credit card? Call me when that happens, until then I see this as just another PayPal.

Unless we're already there, but some short internet searches found nothing but misleading blog post titles.

The One X has an NFC sensor, so it should work with Wallet. Doesn't it?

The international version does, after lots of hacking and side-loading. The AT&T HTC One X does not. It is missing the secure element. As soon as Google decides to take this seriously and make their software compatible with devices whose names do not start with Nexus, then yeah, I'll be interested in this too.

And it really is up to them. It shouldn't be any more difficult than hitting install in the Google Play store. If I choose to buy an "insecure" phone, that's up to me. Warn me, fine ... but don't make the software incompatible. That's lame.

It's not that it is missing the Secure Element. Simply that Google does not have access to the Master Keys for that Secure Element.

If they're going to get penalized for the resulting fraud then no, it isn't up to you.

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