Google WalletCopied

Google's payments branding has been a carousel. Ars Technica counted Google Wallet's 2022 return as the company's fourth rebrand of its payment system: Wallet ran from 2011 to 2015, became Android Pay, then Google Pay in 2018, and a separate new Google Pay app had launched in the US only about a year before Wallet came back. Google announced the return at its I/O conference in May 2022, and the app began rolling out on 20 July as an in-place update to the old Google Pay app.

The reason was scope. Google wanted to replace the physical wallet, not just the card in it. 9to5Google listed what Wallet would hold at launch: credit and debit cards, transit and event tickets, boarding passes, gift and loyalty cards, vaccination records, and in time digital car keys and student IDs. Google's own German announcement, by Wallet product director Dong Min Kim, said people increasingly wanted to keep different cards and new digital items such as car keys in one place for quick access, and that the app would launch in Germany and 38 other countries. Google Pay did not disappear; it stayed as the name of the payment service itself, on in-store stickers, terminals and the Buy with Google Pay button online, which 9to5Google likened to Apple's split between the Wallet app and Apple Pay.

The icon had leaked in April. 9to5Google described it as a blue wallet at the bottom with a cutout from which red, yellow and green cards rise, using Google's four colours, and noted it had more than a few similarities with the iPhone's Wallet icon. It replaced a GPay mark of two interlocking multicoloured arcs that were meant to suggest wallets but did not read that way. The app itself, named simply Wallet, used Dynamic Color theming, put tap-to-pay cards in a carousel and passes in a feed below, and renamed the Quick Settings tile.

The rollout added to the confusion. Android Central noted that in the US and Singapore Wallet would sit alongside the newer Pay app, while most other countries simply had their old Pay app converted. Ars Technica was scathing about the state of Google's payment products at the time.

The icon is the best part of the story: a literal picture of what the app does, finally readable at a glance. The naming around it is the opposite. A wallet that looks a lot like Apple's, in an ecosystem that keeps renaming itself, asks users to trust that this time the brand will stay put.