Google Pay: Save and Pay

The Play summary says it out loud

The line at the top of this page does something store pages almost never do. It admits the app doesn’t work: the US Google Pay app is no longer available for use. That’s the developer’s own summary, and it matters far more than anything in the screenshots sitting above it.

What it used to do

In its working life this handled tap-to-pay at a checkout, held cards and loyalty passes, and moved money between people, and it was well regarded at all three jobs. Those years are what the reviews were written about, and the praise in them was earned rather than inflated. Tapping a phone against a card reader felt like a small piece of the future arriving, and splitting a bill without asking anyone for their bank details removed an awkward moment from an evening out. A US reader who sets it up today gets none of it. The functions moved across to Google Wallet, which is the supported, actively developed payments product on Android now rather than a stopgap somebody assembled in a hurry.

Why the score still looks respectable

A star average is a poor instrument for something that has been switched off. What you’re looking at is a number earned across years of the app doing its job, with newer complaints from people who turned up expecting a payment service thinned out across all of it. The score describes the past. The product exists in the present, and the two came apart completely.

The listing is the real failure

This is the part that drags the verdict down, and it has nothing to do with the software. A retired product left standing on the store, with screenshots of a working wallet and no plain redirection where a new arrival would look, does real harm to that person. Somebody wants a way to pay with their phone, finds a familiar Google name and a healthy-looking page, sets it up, opens it, and hits a dead end with no obvious next move. Nothing hands them over to Wallet by name at the moment they need it. That confusion repeats for every new arrival, and it keeps feeding fresh complaints into a product nobody is maintaining.

Outside the US it reads differently

Google Pay runs under separate implementations in several markets, so a reader in India or Singapore may well have a working app under the same brand and be baffled by all of this. That ambiguity is precisely the problem. One name, one page, and wildly different answers depending on where the reader happens to be standing when they open it.

For a US reader there’s nothing here to recommend, and that isn’t a criticism of the software as it was. Wallet does the job this one used to do. This app is finished, and the kindest honest thing to say is that it was good while it ran.