Earlier this year, Google pushed out a redesign to its mobile wallet and changed the name from Android Pay to Google Pay. Now, Google Pay has passed 100 million installs from the Play Store.
Google Pay is currently available for free download from the Play Store, which makes it available for pretty much anyone that wants to give it a try. Given that recent polling suggests that smartphone users are using their devices for payments as much as possible, this could be a good sign going forward. However, given that adoption rates are still lagging the market, the promise implied by the polling and numbers of downloads may not be readily met.
In fact, other reports suggest that Android Pay is to be part of a much larger ecosystem, giving customers with accounts on Google Play, on Assistant, or even on YouTube access to the Google Pay infrastructure. This potentially opens up an even wider pool of users and suggests that Google could be primed to run the table.
As revealed by Pali Bhat, Google’s vice president of project management for payments, Google ultimately wants to make every one of its users able to pay via Google Pay, whether they’ve downloaded the app or not.
The problem, of course, is that intent and possibility don’t always translate into tangible reality. We’ve already recently seen how mobile payments in general may be poised for an uptick thanks to a growing number of users who either have already or are planning to put mobile payments to work. Yet as anyone who’s made a particularly difficult New Year’s resolution already knows, it’s not always easy or even possible to convert plans to actions.
Google Pay has made impressive inroads, bringing in a whole lot of new business along with plenty of old business from Android Pay users who migrated to Google Pay once Android Pay was no longer a thing. Even in the midst of this, however, just because an app has been downloaded doesn’t mean it will be put to use with any kind of regularity.
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