A preview of the app that the company shared by accident on the Google Play store in India says that Google Wallet will finally come out in India. This comes almost two years after it was relaunched as a digital wallet platform in the U.S.
When TechCrunch saw the listing for the app, which will, among other things, let users load up loyalty cards and buy things, the company wouldn’t say for sure that it would be coming soon to Android users. On the other hand, it seems to pull some information from the ad, like what look like well-known launch partners in India. (The app now shows U.S. names in a more general way.)
Google did tell us that, for now at least, Google Pay will still be available in the country as a separate app, which is a bit confusing. In almost every other market, Google has been combining the Wallet and Pay features into a single Wallet app. Here, they are taking a different approach.
“Right now we don’t have anything new to share, but we’re always working to make digital life easier for people in India.” “We’re continuing to put money into the Google Pay app so that people can make safe and easy digital payments,” a Google spokesman told TechCrunch.
We think that one reason is that Google Pay is already very popular in the country. India is Google’s biggest payment market in the world, and Google Pay is the second most popular payment app after PhonePe.
Google has said that it will keep offering Google Pay as a payment option in India. This is one reason why the Indian version of Google Wallet is likely to be different from the US version. For one thing, Google wants to add local features to the Wallet app in the country that has the most Android users.
A listing for Google Wallet last week that included photos of Indian airline Air India, state-owned bank State Bank of India, and multiplex chain PVR Inox. This suggests that loyalty points can be earned and used with these brands. TechCrunch asked Google for a response, and soon after, Google added U.S. brands to the list.
The existing Google Wallet app is not yet available for download in India through the Play Store. However, some Android users in the country have been able to use it for a while, as revealed by the Indian news outlet Beebom. But the app doesn’t do much. Users can add credit and debit cards to make contactless payments, but it doesn’t work with any Indian stores or loyalty programs.
These new changes are the culmination of a lot of switching that Google has been doing between different financial services and apps with different names. Google Wallet has been the company’s way to pay since it first came out in 2011. Google then came out with Android Pay. Then it tried to use Google Pay instead of Wallet and its Android Pay app. Google made the Wallet app all over again in 2022 as its digital wallet tool for Wear OS, Fitbit OS, and Android. But in February of this year, the search giant said that the Wallet app would take the place of Google Pay in the U.S.
Google Pay in India is different from its U.S. counterpart in that it uses the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a system backed by the Indian government, to process payments. India’s Google Pay is different because of this, and the company may decide to keep giving people a different choice if they are already using it.
In India, Google Pay is the second most popular UPI app, only behind Walmart’s PhonePe. This suggests that Google will continue to support it, even though the bank app already has digital bank features. According to figures released by the National Payments Corporation of India, which is the parent company of UPI, the Google Pay app was used to start more than 5 billion transactions worth more than $83 billion in March.
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