Today, apparently, is the day of the launch of Google Wallet, the fourth rebranding of the Google payment system. Reddit users are reporting that the app has been rolled out to them and a version has surfaced on APKMirror if you want to download it. Google also launched many wallet-related support pages today.
Google Wallet was announced at Google I/O 2022 and is reverting back to the original Google Payments product name. Wallet originally existed from around 2011 to 2015, then it became Android Pay, then Google Pay in 2018, and now Wallet is back in 2022. Google’s roaring payment products have never been worse than they are now, with sort of an outbound product, Google Pay has been on the market for just over a year.
While the Google Pay brand has been around for over a year, Google released a completely new codebase in March 2021. This new version of Google Pay used the code base of “Google Tez”, a payment product designed for India. Compared to the old Google Pay, the new Google Pay had a lot of feature regressions such as losing multi-device login support, not having multi-account support, and not being compatible with anything that didn’t have a SIM card, which meant that Google Pay Site should have been stripped of functionality.
The package name for Google Wallet is “com.google.android.apps.walletnfcrel”which means that Google Wallet is a built-in update to the old Google Pay app that Google forced US users to remove about a year ago. It would be great if if Google just rolled everything back to the old codebase, but that’s not what’s happening, at least not in the US. Internationally, Google has a great rollout plan for Google Wallet. The catastrophic rollout of the new Google Pay (Tez) only happened in the US and Singapore, so only the old Google Pay (walletnfcrel) exists internationally, which is being replaced by Google Wallet. One app will be able to perform all your Google Payment duties, such as one-touch payments and sending money to contacts.
In the US and Singapore, Google doesn’t seem to want to clean up the mess last year and wants the new Google Pay and Google Wallet apps to live next to each other. In all cases, in fact, Google Play Services handles click-to-pay payments, while in the US, New Google Pay will handle P2P payments (a feature it’s exceptionally bad at due to things like lack of multi-account support).). Does this leave Google Wallet… to show loyalty cards? Being a shortcut for Google Play Services? The wallet has nothing to do now.
Consequently, Wallet doesn’t have much to look at right now, just the usual NFC card interface, a few loyalty cards, and a subway map search. The non-monetary parts of Wallet are what Wallet will focus on going forward. Today, Wallet will scan your email for membership cards, and mine found cards I didn’t even know existed, like a Best Buy loyalty card that hasn’t been used in probably 15 years. You can add student ID cards, COVID-19 vaccination cards, subway maps, and someday the app plans to support digital driver’s licenses and car keys.