Google Wallet rolls out to users, will live alongside Google Pay in the US
Enlarge / There's not a lot to see in Google Wallet, just the usual NFC interface and a few loyalty cards.
Today is apparently the launch day for Google Wallet-Google's fourth rebrand of its payment system. Users on Reddit report the app has rolled out to them, and a version has popped up on APKMirror if you want to sideload. Google also launched a ton of support pages today relating to Wallet.
Google Wallet was announced at Google I/O 2022 and brings back the original Google payments product name. Wallet was originally around from 2011 to 2015, then it became Android Pay, then Google Pay in 2018, and now Wallet is back in 2022. Google's turbulent payment products have never been worse than right now, where the sort-of-outgoing product, Google Pay, has been on the market for just over a year.
While the Google Pay brand has been around longer than a year, Google pushed out a completely new codebase in March 2021. This new version of Google Pay used the codebase of "Google Tez," a payments product developed for India. Compared to the older Google Pay, New Google Pay had a ton of feature regressions, like losing support for logging in to multiple devices, no support for multiple accounts, and no compatibility with anything that didn't have a SIM card, which meant the Google Pay website had to be stripped of functionality.