Google thinks the time is right to bring back Wallet – The Verge

Google has announced that its bringing back the Wallet app as a place to manage payment cards, gift cards, rewards cards, passes, and more. Wallet used to be a standalone app before it was folded into Google Pay. Now, the company is making it a separate app again, saying that consumers and companies alike are pushing for digital cards.

Wallet will be the app you use to store and manage your debit and credit cards on Android. (Youll be able to use it across Googles ecosystem in apps like Google Pay and on the web via Chrome Autocomplete.) But Google wants it to be much more than just a way to store credit and rewards cards. The company is also pitching Wallet as the place to keep your transit cards, proof of vaccination, tickets to events, and even your government-issued ID and car keys.

Older versions of Google Wallet had similar (if more limited) aspirations, but Google says other companies are now more ready to provide people with digital cards and identification to fill the app up. For example, some hotels have shown that theyre willing to provide digital room keys, and some state governments in the US are working on issuing digital drivers licenses. Apple has also been working on adding these kinds of use cases to its own Wallet app, which Googles offering seems very similar to. Thats not to say that Googles copying Apple here, but it could have some catching up to do since Apples been pushing this kind of experience for years.

Timing and context matter, said Bill Ready, Googles president of commerce and payments, in an interview with The Verge. He said that companies and other institutions want to provide users with a way to store their info digitally, and Google Wallet will be one of the places they can do that. Ready said that the companys trying to build Wallet on a bed of open ecosystems, which he thinks will open up a plethora of new use cases.

As an example of what that could look like, Ready talked about Google Wallets integration with Google Maps. If you have your transit pass stored in Google Wallet, youll be able to see how much moneys left on it when youre viewing possible routes in Maps, which can also tell you how much a certain ride will cost. If you dont have enough on your pass to cover fares, Maps could even let you add more funds from within the app using the payment card stored in Wallet.

Of course, all of this has to be supported by the specific transit system youre trying to use, but Ready said that transit providers were some of the most enthusiastic organizations when it came to digital identity. Googles going to be reliant on third parties for many of the features its trying to add to Wallet, but Ready thinks its open-ecosystem approach will help and that companies generally wont have to pay to integrate into Wallet.

How this rollout will go also depends on where in the world you are: in a lot of countries, the Google Pay app is becoming Google Wallet. Thats not the case in the US and Singapore, though in those countries, Wallet will be a separate app, while Pay will stay around as a payments-centered app that helps people pay friends and save and manage money. In India, Google Pay is staying the same.

The move toward Wallet as a standalone app that integrates into other apps makes a lot of sense to me. While many of the features Googles promising for Wallet are currently available in Google Pay or Android itself, they dont necessarily fit in there Im not really paying for anything when Im using my boarding pass to get on a plane, but itd totally make sense to keep something like that in my wallet.

Its also nice to be able to manage all your cards in one place (like you can with, say, a physical wallet), and Google Pay just has too much other stuff going on to be great at that. Unlike Pay, Wallet is just going to be on Android to start, but youll be able to access some of the information you put in it on other platforms. Some things, like digital IDs, will likely be locked to a single device.

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Google thinks the time is right to bring back Wallet - The Verge