After four years since the introduction of Google Pay, Google has now announced at its I/O developers’ conference that it’ll be bringing back its standalone Google Wallet app.
The original Wallet app was combined with Android Pay back at the beginning of 2018 to create Google Pay, but the tech giant says that it thinks the market is now mature enough for a digital wallet once again as more companies are now willing to offer digital cards, which have increasingly become more popular among consumers as they’ve transitioned to a more cashless environment. Aside from payment options, the new Google Wallet will also perform many other functions that its predecessor aspired to do, such as hold transit cards, proofs of vaccination, event and flight tickets, identification cards and driving licenses, and even hotel keys.
Google hasn’t provided a concrete date for when the new Wallet app will roll out, but the company says it’ll be “coming soon” to more than 40 countries. In most cases, the Google Pay app will simply update itself and transform into the new Google Wallet, but Android users in regions like the U.S., India and Singapore will have the option of keeping both separately. To learn more about the change, you can head over to Google’s latest blog post.
Elsewhere in tech, Apple has finally retired the iPod family.
wazup.