Google Pay becomes another app to find its way into Google’s graveyard of apps as the search engine giant will cease the peer-to-peer payments app from operations from June 4th, 2024, onwards. Yep, the company has decided to bid adieu to Google Pay in the United States (US) keeping Google Wallet as the sole payment app to clear confusion around two payment apps.
Google says its NFC-powered Google Wallet is used five times more than Google Pay in the United States. You have time till June 4th to get all your remaining balance from Google Pay to Google Wallet. This will primarily affect users in the US and not other markets. For instance, Google Pay is huge in India where Google Wallet is unavailable and thus, it will remain operable.
Google has a keen interest in rebranding apps. Google Bard recently became Google Gemini. In 2018, Android Pay was renamed as Google Pay as an all-in-one payment service, checking recent purchases, peer-to-peer payments, store loyalty cards, a variety of payment cards, access rewards, etc. It later split Google Pay (the peer-to-peer app) from Google Wallet (an NFC-powered app to store passes and cards). Cut to now, it is finally putting Google Pay in the US to the app graveyard while combining some of the features with Google Wallet to make the transition easy.
Google Wallet is currently on the rise in the US and can be primarily used to exhibit NFC-powered tap-to-pay via credit or debit cards, store digital car keys, passes, and tickets, manage loyalty programs, access government IDs, and a few more chops under its sleeves. However, Google seems to have no plan to bring a peer-to-peer payments feature on Google Wallet anytime soon. It hasn’t announced any plans of supporting P2P transactions at the time of writing this.
As aforementioned, the last date to get all your funds from Google Pay transferred to your bank is June 4th. If you forget to withdraw by that date or miss out on it, you can still use the Google Pay web version to manage your funds. The web version will continue to hold credit and debit cards and other functionalities it supports as there’s no update on its closure yet.
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