Pay set up support for NFC cards years ago, and loyalty cards/passes have been around for a while, too. While this is still somewhat of an ambitious goal, it’s one that’s very much achievable. That means managing your NFC-enabled mobile payments, housing loyalty cards and tickets, holding on to public transit info and gift cards, and eventually, carrying your ID/driver’s license.

Wallet wants nothing more than to replace your physical wallet. Google Wallet, on the other hand, is a much more focused idea. And really, it just wasn’t what most folks actually wanted and, frankly, I’d be shocked if anything beyond its peer-to-peer payments feature survives beyond the next two years. The aforementioned feature delays, the change to a phone number-based account, and other problems really undercut the launch. It seemed like Google was going all in, but it just didn’t stick the landing. There was quite a bit of excitement about GPay before it launched, because the previous Google Pay had been largely neglected for a while beforehand. GPay has a lot of great ideas, but even now it’s still a mess At one point, it was going to be a literal bank account. But the ambitious ideas that GPay tried to bring to other markets were held back and, in turn, killed off due to delays, an extremely confusing app layout, and management shuffles. That version of Google Pay was designed based on “Tez,” a version of Google Pay that was built up in India to huge success (and that isn’t changing). Google Wallet is the culmination not of that roller coaster of indecision, but of the clear failure that was bringing “GPay” to the global market. Ok so it’s still a little confusing, but it’s better now I promise! Over the past decade, we’ve gone from Google Wallet to Android Pay to Google Pay in two different apps to a terrible version of Google Pay in an app and a separate “app” built into Google Play Services and now, finally, Google Wallet again. To say that Google’s strategy in mobile payments has been messy is an understatement. It represents a new focus for mobile payments on Android, and it’s great, if only because it’s exactly the opposite of the “GPay” disaster that preceded it. This week Google Wallet officially rolled out to Android users just a couple of months after it was announced at I/O 2022.

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