May 08, 2024 02:52 PM IST
The payments duties remain with the Google Pay app, while Wallet wants to put your tickets, boarding passes, loyalty accounts and digital documents within one interface
Google has rolled out the Google Wallet app for Android phones in India. However, compared to the Wallet’s structure in many other countries including the US, things work a little differently with the Indian version. It will not handle digital payments for now, since responsibility remains with the popular Google Pay app, available on Android devices as well as the Apple iPhone. Google’s approach with Wallet in India is what they call “everyday essentials”, and easy access to those elements. For now, Wallet will not handle digital payments with credit cards, debit cards or UPI.
These could include movie or event tickets, flight boarding passes or train tickets, public transit cards, hotel loyalty accounts and memberships, as well as potentially digitising important physical documents for quick access later. In due course, Google hopes to extend the Wallet app in India to support digital keys as well, at some point later this year. In many countries, digital car keys are available for certain models by German automaker BMW.
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“The arrival of Google Wallet in India marks an important milestone in Android’s India journey, bringing innovative and convenient experiences to simplify peoples’ daily lives. From boarding passes to loyalty cards, and event tickets to public transport passes – they’re there when you need them,” says Ram Papatla, general manager and India Engineering Lead for Android at Google, in a statement.
There is a reason why Google doesn’t want to take any risky bets with either extending Google Pay’s product positioning or replacing it with a new app for digital payments. It is, quite simply, the dominance Google Pay has garnered over time. According to official data for April 2024, PhonePe clocked around 6.5 billion UPI transactions, while Google Pay was a close second with 5 billion transactions out of a total of 13.3 billion transactions. It was a similar trend in March as well.
There is also the element of broad availability – Google Pay is available on iPhones as well, whereas Wallet will be an Android exclusive for now. At launch, Google Wallet has the support of more than 20 brands present in the country across a variety of domains, including PVR and Inox, Air India, Indigo, Flipkart, Pine Labs, Kochi Metro and Abhibus. Beyond brand linked account data, the ability to scan any barcode-based document, or even parking tickets and luggage tags within the Wallet app, should have definite useability.
Air India, for instance, becomes the first airline which will integrate boarding passes for travellers, in their Google Wallet app. For this to work, not just for Air India but for any event ticket or pass, users will have to enable the ‘smart personalisation settings’ within the Gmail app, for direct data integration between Wallet and your mailbox. “This helps us provide an environmentally friendly solution to our valued guests that also provides digital features such as auto-update of boarding pass details in a convenient central location on their Android phones.” says Satya Ramaswamy, chief digital and technology officer for Air India, in a statement.
The question still remains — would you develop Google Wallet as a habit? Think about it, when you’d like to check the status of your Flipkart SuperCoins or your Indigo flight boarding pass, you’d likely head to those individual apps as a habit. That’s perhaps Google’s biggest challenge with Wallet in India.
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vishal Mathur is Technology Editor for Hindustan Times. When not making sense of technology, he often searches for an elusive analog space in a digital world.
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