Which means this is almost certainly a temporary closure. Google will almost certainly relaunch with a new name, branding, and UX that rides on the coattails of Apple's marketing efforts, but P2P will be coming back. If you're competing with Apple, you can't just not do a thing Apple is doing.
Apple has had P2P payments for a while. Yesterday's announcement was that now you can tap to pay for those. Before, you'd have to send money via iMessage.
I think it's most likely still going to be sending money "via iMessage" (or more precisely: via a book transfer between two Green Dot Visa prepaid card accounts, addressed by an iCloud address and initiated over iMessage in UX terms).
Yes and no. It's still a cash-equivalent transaction, requiring you to either have an Apple Cash balance and/or an attached checking account or debit card (in the USA at least).
If I'm understanding correctly, the difference is that it's going through VISA directly. Kind of like how you can send someone a Starbucks gift card through iMessage / Messages app, without it ever going through Apple Cash technically.
How so? It only works between two Apple Cash accounts, so it can just be a book transfer within the bank maintaining these (Green Dot), no Visa required.
Or do they now allow it between two non-Apple-Cash debit cards? That would indeed require some network to work across banks.
In the case of Starbucks, they're taking advantage of an API within the Messages app, so as long as a third party implements something similar to what Starbucks is doing, I assume any other banking app could do the same, like Zelle could theoretically have their app allow you to just send cash via Messages if they implement the code needed for the Messages app. Now whether or not Apple would allow it is another story. I appreciate them gate keeping garbage from their app store, but they shouldnt just gate keep things they themselves do, its anti-competitive.
Yeah, but the new feature presented yesterday is not that. It's just a new (and definitely useful!) contact discovery and payment request initiation channel for Apple Cash (which has been around for a few years now), as far as I can tell.
P2P is a loss making feature for nearly everyone involved. If you have some other way to obtaining users and maintaining growth, you are better off not supporting P2P payments.
P2P payments are also extremely tiny portion of revenue.
For a nice ecological circle. With the large predator dying and decomposing back to Pay, and their skin being made into a Wallet, because of its monopolistic pointlessness, and lack of ability to implement even a credit card with a 400,000 customer waitlist.
>If you're competing with X, you can't just not do a thing X is doing
this simply isn't true
there are reasons to compete, like not lose the share of those who find that feature important, or to attack the profitability of that service for your competitor
but there are reasons not to compete, like losing too much money and not impacting your competitor.
This is why Google and Apple as corporations barely look alike at all.
Then Google will inexplicably move the functionality from Wallet into their new GeminiPay or whatever app, but GeminiPay will only be available in half ths markets Wallet was in. Then in 5 years GeminiPay will be deprecated and Wallet will be brought back with half of its original functionality.
Google really needs to start publishing LTS commitments on their new services - or put "beta" tags with disclosures on them - so at least you know how long they're guaranteeing support on a service you are getting committed to. The reputation they're accruing by killing all of these services is really affecting the consideration for new services. That is a very hard to measure and consider data point, but I can say first hand for my own services and those of companies I advise - this point comes up every time someone mentions electing for a google service.
Imagine considering building gemeni into your product knowing full well they will likely sunset it in a year or two or force you into the newest version (or replacement service entirely) vs OpenAI who are supporting and reducing cost on legacy models and service as they release new ones.
The other ugly side of this is the sunsetting of free tiers and plans on many products they do choose to keep. Gsuite free edition is a very good example - early adopters of gsuite for businesses were promised it would remain free, only to find that last year google walked back on that and sunset nearly all the free gsuite accounts, forcing early adopters (and supporters) to pay or get off. Google One is another example - they removed the ability for gsuite accounts to subscribe to Google One individually, and the aftermath of that was "take your data out or upgrade your entire organization to a premium storage tier per user". Zero intention to accommodate or support those users that had been happily paying for that service for years. Icing on the cake: they kept billing for it even after removing access to the service.
Yes. I'm actually worried about Golang too. Moved to it from Common Lisp but I am worried about the long term liability of it.
They also started doing telemetry and other things in the language because it is being treated as a product and then what happens if Google loses interest in it?
Would have gone all in on Rust if it just was aesthetically pleasing.
Golang is 14 years old, used by Google in production projects, and still in active development so it has a good track record. It's also open-source so worst case scenario it would get forked and community-maintained without Google backing. I wouldn't be concerned about Golang being deprecated.
Google does for paying customers. Google Cloud and Workspace (or whatever their "cloud office suite" is branded now) both have deprecation windows for launched features/products.
On the bright side, I think getting the money-sending integration would be more politically viable, at which point we can just piggyback the messaging on top of it.
SMS and cryptocurrency have largely solved the "send info or money to anyone instantly" problem. then entities stepped in to protect their walled gardens (governments in control of financial systems, apple, facebook, google) and viola, everything is fragmented and the problem has been unsolved.
the issue was never making it happen technically, it's the entrenched power structures prioritizing money/power over actual progress.
I don't know what's going on in the other side of the ocean, but around here, but in the SEPA we have had instant transfers between bank accounts for a while. Some banks are trying to slow it down (like charging 1€ for transfers) for some reason, but personally I use it all the time and it's great. I'm not sure why you'd have to make up this big conspiracy theory about governments not wanting people to send money to other people.
FedNow is being implemented now across the industry. It is the "SEPA" for the USA. It will replace the 3rd party hacks (covering up the slow and tedious nature of ACH) that currently exist via Venmo, Cashapp, Zelle[0], etc
[0]: Zelle is ran by a consortium of FIs. I don't know for certain what will happen to it, but I suspect if it stays around in name it would switch to the FedNow rail behind the scenes.
> Who should download the FedNow ISO 20022 message specifications and how can I access them?
> The Federal Reserve is using the MyStandards® platform to provide access to the FedNow ISO 20022 message specifications and accompanying implementation guide. You can access these on the Federal Reserve Financial Services portal (Off-site) under the FedNow Service. Users need a MyStandards account, which you can create on the SWIFT website (Off-site). View our step-by-step guide (PDF, Off-site) for tips on accessing the specifications.
> The WebMonetization spec [4] and docs [5] specifies the `monetization` <meta> tag for indicating where supporting browsers can send payments and micropayments:
Some of these sentences seem sort of related. You're just linking to Google searches and providing random snippets from linked sites. Overall this comment and many of the comments in your history look like spam.
Compared to aigen with citations found for whatever was generated without consideration for truth and ethical reasoning?
The heuristics should be improved, then; we shouldn't ask me to put these in PDFs without typed edges to URLs and schema.org/Datasets, to support a schema.org/Claim or a ClaimReview in a SocialMediaPosting about a NewsArticle about a ScholarlyArticle :about a Thing skos:Concept with a :url.
Would you have deep linked your way to those resources (which are useful enough to be re-cited here for later reference) without the researcher doing it for you?
Technical writing courses for example advise to include the searches that you used in the databases that you found oracles in, in order to help indicate the background research bias prior to the hypothesis at least.
> Technical writing courses for example advise to include the searches that you used in the databases that you found oracles in, in order to help indicate the background research bias prior to the hypothesis at least.
I'm not writing a doctoral thesis. These comments are not my livelihood. I'm just sharing industry knowledge on a topic I know about.
Your random links without context, some of the links to literal Google searches, are not in any way useful or interesting.
It's the style of comments you get on a lot of conspiracy sites. I see comment styles like that on a lot of articles linked from places like rense.com.
I certainly didn't think the comments weren't human-generated. I was actually defending you. I just think your style of commenting comes across as unusual here, which is why it attracts attention. On other parts of the Internet the style you use is more common and would not raise eyebrows.
IIUC the EU basically had to force banks to implement this via a mandate. I don't see "business friendly" US lawmakers doing the same anytime soon. The joys of the Free market™!
I mean, yes, it was mandated, but I am decently confident a usable system would have emerged one way or the other. In Germany we had a standardized API for online banking (HBCI) just because banks agreed it would be reasonable to do that.
One major difference is that the American banking market is significantly more fragmented as a policy choice compared to Europe. By share of deposits, the top four are JPMorgan Chase at 16%, BofA at 15%, Wells Fargo at 11%, and Citibank at 5%.
The fragmentation means it’s very difficult to get thousands of credit unions and smaller banks compliant with things, since the lesser regulations for these smaller institutions is a policy choice to let them survive and thrive. The US favors these to avoid market concentrations like the big cross border European bank failures in the financial crisis, and also because smaller banks lend more to small or rural businesses.
Your response sounds a bit defensive of the US, my intention is not to start a tribe war and I apologise if I have done that. There are plenty of things that the US does well that Europe does not, if that's any consolation.
Paypal exists in the EU as well but this is a layer on top of a banking system and not quite a "native" solution. I would like a "native banking" way to send and receive money when I am both in the EU and the US :)
When I want to send money to a friend of acquaintance, they generally show/send me a payment QR code, which contains their bank account number and amount. From what I can tell, this is typical in the Czech Republic.
> How about adversarial integration? Why can't I send money from cashapp to venmo? Is the technology not there yet?
Because companies want you to be locked in their ecosystem. The industry keeps saying they can self regulate, but until lawmakers step in, expect that the consumers will continue to be harmed because companies are chasing profits, not actually improving the user experiences.
When I was in China, the government issued an edict that basically said "merchants of a certain size must accept AliPay/WeChat Pay/UnionPay CloudPay universally". All of the above are almost identical "Scan my QR code" to pay.
It would be nice to have such an edict, forcing compatibility outside of the ACH system but it will never happen.
Yep, Australia has used BSB/account number for many decades, and launched the NPP (instant transfer between banks proxied via the reserve bank) almost a decade ago that allows you to register your own identifiers like phone number, email, etc.
Last time I was in America (admittedly 5 years ago now), most places didn't even do Apple Pay (we had this near ubiquitous 9 years ago), you needed a physical card and to _sign_ for things most places (we phased out signatures a decade ago because they're quite insecure) and most places seem to accept paper cheques with all the risks and complexities they come with.
I'm not trying to have a pissing contest with America here, but what the fuck are they doing? They seem to arbitrarily decide to dig their feet on for "personal freedoms and choices" for things that benefit them whilst simultaniously giving them away for things that don't.
The post office idea makes a lot of sense to me. There are a lots of people with no bank account but could use a pay app that isn't going to screw them.
The unbanked in the USA don't have a bank account for a variety of reasons. Typically
1. Mistrust and fear of "being in the system"
2. Having a legal judgment against them e.g. child support, fines, overdue rent
3. Avoiding showing income to not lose income-defined government benefits
4. Hiding income from tax authorities
Because every app needs to be the dominant one or it can't possibly make enough money to make a VC happy, which is the answer to all three of your questions. You want infrastructure, not private networks, and there is no infrastructure, just private networks trying to be infrastructure for rent-seeking purposes.
In India we have a thing called upi which let's us send money from one bank acc to other one, it doesn't matter which app we are using. We can send money from gpay to whatsapp, phonepe, etc. The transactions are directly made via banks and not the app wallets which is much easier to use.
Keep in mind some of these are exempt from the now delayed US tax rules and some are not.
Zelle is on the exempt list but PayPal, Venmo, and cash app are not.
It’s going to be interesting when people start getting tax forms from all these companies and need to back track if they were tip splitting or getting paid for their side hustle.
Honestly, I made the mistake of looking to standardize on Google when I bought a Pixel. I got the watch some Google Home devices and they have in the following years terminated the Fit API, terminated gPay, reduce the integration to Home at this point I have no trust in Google to even maintain the basic services they offered the year prior.
This made me recall another great Googlism. My Google Home device can stream music and what is that default player when I say OK, Google play...
It's Spotify. I'm a YouTube Subscriber, you know another Google product which is a Spotify competitor. Ok Google play AC/DC on YouTube Music. Nope, it's commercials in Spotify.
Can you imagine a world where Apple sold the music rights on the iPad to Spotify?
It's so ludicrously short sighted and against the whole principle of an integrated Google ecosystem. They sabotage long term gains for short term profit and wonder why they keep failing. Well, maybe because you compete against yourselves.
I know the common joke is that Google made a mess of their messaging apps. I 100% am not clear what the correct app is to be able to do tap to pay from my phone. Kind of comical how hard that is to figure out.
The more fundamental issue was that the first iteration of gPay was born from Tez, which was explicitly created by Google's NBU (Next Billion Users) team led by Cesar Sengupta out of Singapore, for the Indian market with UPI compliance. It was extremely well-received and that justified the investments to port it to the US and some EMEA markets. But those markets already had Google Wallet for storing cards and because of how siloed product teams historically are at Google, there ended up being parallel tracks for GWallet & GPay.
As far as I can tell, a couple of years ago attempts were made to merge the key features of the two, at which point there was a time where US users had access to both gPay & gWallet. Now, it's come mostly full circle and Google's got most of the non-P2P features from gPay into gWallet and is deprecating gPay.
It'll be interesting to see if they add P2P to gWallet. I like to think so, but on the other hand I'm perfectly happy continuing to have a half dozen (not quite) other apps for the same purpose. CashApp, Venmo, Zelle, Paypal, not to mention the other platform apps that have P2P built in.
The curve is that Google Pay is the app I used to get credit cards onto my phone way back when. Is also the app that used to come up if I wanted to select which card to tap to pay with.
Not understanding. What part is hard to figure out? The UI is literally that you tap your phone! There is no "app".
You only run the "Wallet" app UI if you want to mess with payment details, and even then it's integrated with all the other account payment stuff. So if you tried to sign up for more Drive space or ad-free youtube or whatever you've already done it. And in the worst case if you tap and you don't have it set up, it pops up automatically and prompts you.
Your complaint seems to be limited to the fact that they used an app name ("GPay") for something other than NFC payments. But... so what?
There is an app that you can use to manage your cards but you can also manage them on the web, where by nature Google is of two minds so you can use wallet.google.com or payments.google.com. The difference between these seems to be a UI with rounded corners vs. one with sharp corners on dialog boxes. On one of these sites you can check your Google Pay balance and on the other you can check you Google Play balance. Not confusing.
The app is, and has always been, "Wallet". The cancelled app was a peer payment thing to compete with Venmo, it wasn't about payment handling. Nor was it about NFC payment device handling, which hasn't changed either.
I distinctly remember adding it to the Google Pay app at some point in the past.
Checking my phone now, I see that i don't have Google Wallet, and instead there is an unbranded Wallet that may be on my phone? Just, what the actual F? Are those the same thing? If Wallet is a generic thing on my phone, do I want Google Wallet, which Google Pay is telling me I should be using to manage my credit cards, now?
As mentioned, there are multiple ways to access payment processing. Most people don't go to an app on their phone, they do it at the point of sale, likely by following a link from Drive or YouTube or TV or whatever to the web UI (pay.google.com in fact redirects to wallet.google.com).
But the core secrets management and NFC handling app on your phone is and has been "Wallet", and the fact that you claim to be confused about that now is just evidence that you've never needed to use this UI because it Just Works.
The nonsense in this thread is about this "GPay" app, which is not and never was a payments management app. It was a peer payment service, itself based on Wallet. And no one was ever confused about it until they needed an excuse to yell on HN. They just didn't use it much, I guess, so it's been cancelled.
The confusion is because "Android Wallet" was renamed to "Google Pay" quite a few years back, and only last year was renamed back to "Google Wallet". GPay was a separate app, yes, but it also linked directly into "Google Pay" for card management.
It certainly has not "always been" Wallet. First there was Android Pay, then Google Pay, then Wallet. This doesn't include their weird little market-specific side quests which included Google Wallet (a different app to the aforementioned Google Wallet), Google Pay Send, Tez and Google Pay (different to the aforementioned Google Pay, the one this article is about).
Someone mentioned that in Europe you can send via IBAN to anyone. Well in Ukraine you can just use card number and send money to any bank. There is virtually no bank in Ukraine that doesn’t support this. Obviously IBAN also works for that, but nobody uses it for P2P, only to pay companies for provided services. It’s a big surprise for me that people actually need third party apps for P2P money transfers.
In Australia we've been able to do BSB (simpler domestic version of IBAN) for decades, and we introduced NPP 6 years ago. All banks now have instant transfer between each other via the BSB method or via your own unique identifier you can pick and give out (your phone number, email, etc).
The focus on P2P pay makes me think that despite how profitable Google and Apple are, their mindset is still US centric which is surely not the country the majority of their profit comes from, given their global reach. Surely they leave money on the table constantly with this focus?
In Hungary you can use email or phone number as well for instant transfer via standard banks (provided you add your email and phone number as a secondary ID besides your IBAN)
I'm always amazed to see how much some other banking systems are waaaay behind.
(googler, opinions are my own. I work in this space).
There are 2 apps here, and their functionality varies by country. Google Wallet is more closely tied into the OS to handle tap-and-pay functionality. In the US (and most of the world), management of your cards happens within the Wallet app (this includes Mobile Drivers License, which works at TSA in airports).
Google Pay has been through a rollcoaster in the US. We had 2 versions sort of going at once for a while. The "newer" version included management of cards for tap&pay for a while, but that all got pulled into Wallet stand along.
For P2P style functionality, Google Pay in India and Singapore are much more functional/popular. But I think those are the only countries where Google Pay P2P is active.
The GPay name is also used for paying online. (using your card-on-file with Google to pay that integrates with a merchants payment processor).
Edit: perhaps, that sounded flippant to those consuming my karma, but that walk through of all the disjointed, scattered and abortive efforts really resonated with me as someone diagnosed with ADHD. It's how I would probably run a company if lacking pressure to channel my distractions into coherent plans.
> (googler, opinions are my own. I work in this space)
Not meaning to attack you personally as I'm sure you're quite good at your job to be at Google, but care to weigh in on why Google's ecosystem as a whole is such a... well, such a mess? As an Apple user I cannot fathom working with Google's offerings, they seem in an endless flux of revamps, rebrands, closings and openings.
Ungoogle yourself. I once, under unfortunate circumstances, lost access to a very valuable phone number (Google project fi). Lost the number, consequently lost acccess to my Gmail account, lost software licenses, Android apps, my emails etc.
I have a random gmail account for Android. Don't even know it out of my head. Some Android apps have register codes (pleco). insync was so kind to grant me a new free license for their software.
I still have (new) google project fi phone since I travel a lot. But google sucks. No accountability, you are the product and expect everything to be gone tomorrow.
That is not even a google service really, it's just a DPAN provided by the card payment networks and your bank that gets loaded into the phone's nfc... it's just a shadow copy of your credit card and the only thing google needs to "maintain" for it is the notification when a transaction is posted so they can include it in a transaction list.
What are they trying to to do? They aren't going to dominate payments in the US, no one can tame that cluster fuck.
Payments have good solid revenue but no where in the range Google/Alphabet is used to. Especially when you consider the high-touch support required in payments.
This product space is so confusing in the US. P2P,does that include "business?" When a person is trying to conduct even the smallest amount of commerce as a street vendor or with another person they are faced with a shrinking lack of choices that all operate in a different way. Venmo, Stripe, Square, Clover?, Zelle. And you have to have them all because one or more of them will drop you after someone rolls out a new poorly tested fraud/abuse/whatever algorithm.
The regulatory landscape is a patchwork where further regulation attempting to clean up the mess generally makes it worse.
This. The proliferation is insane. Makes you yearn for the good 'ol (bad) days when Paypal was king. At least you knew what service to complain about back then. Particularly if you were a vendor, Paypal abuse was rampant.-
I suspect (without hard evidence) the sticking point is regulatory.
Being in the business of allowing private individuals to move money around opens a company to massive scrutiny. Scrutiny Google probably doesn't want, especially if it gives the government an excuse to snoop around in Google's related enterprises.
At the revenue point of the service, let somebody else be Uncle Sam's punching bag.
To add even more noise, there is a similar service from Samsung called Samsung Cash which lets you transfer cash between other Samsung Cash users using a prepaid Visa debit card on the backend. It
My best guess is that it's a lot more costly than "keeping the lights on," probably in liability exposure.
You can eff around a lot in the tech space (in the US) on AI, privacy, data protection and preservation, reliability, etc., but when you get into the financial sector the rules change. The US's monetary system only works because it's audited out to hell and back to avoid people cheating. And the government is quite empowered to enforce scrutiny on that auditing. Even having a toe in the water in the US market probably opens up Google to massive investigative potential they'd prefer to just avoid.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
Which means this is almost certainly a temporary closure. Google will almost certainly relaunch with a new name, branding, and UX that rides on the coattails of Apple's marketing efforts, but P2P will be coming back. If you're competing with Apple, you can't just not do a thing Apple is doing.