Why did Google cut Android Pay out of Wallet if they were just going to do this? It's as if Google's consumer product teams all turn over every 2 years and each one reverses the vision of unity vs fragmented, specialized, self-competing products, executes their vision, and then leaves...
> Why did Google cut Android Pay out of Wallet if they were just going to do this?
They didn't. Android Pay was a renamed of an acquisition that was originally planned to be integrated with Wallet but wasn't (well, until now), it just looked like it was cut out of Wallet because they killed Waller’s similar NFC payment functionality. From the fact that they now for a while have had “pay with Google” that can use cards from Wallet, Android Pay, and some other superficially siloed single-app payment systems at Google, I would assume they’ve actually finally integrated everything to use the same infrastructure as Android Pay, so now the siloes can go away.
Very interesting insight into what happened on the technical side!
The progression of events certainly does make a lot more sense with that perspective, though understanding the details of what actually happened inside the backend doesn't really change the fact that, from a customer perspective, we really did see public-facing messaging indicating that one app was split into two and then later public-facing messaging indicting that (more than) those two apps where then brought back together again a couple years later.
More like each newly turned over product team always makes a https://xkcd.com/927/ decision, and only gets 80% through to completion before the next batch decides to do-over yet again.
