Google thinks the time is right to bring back Wallet

The Wallet app will be coming back as a place to manage payment cards, gift cards, rewards cards, passes, and more. Before it was folded into Google Pay, Wallet was a separate app. The company says that consumers and companies are pushing for digital cards.

You will be able to store and manage your credit and debit cards on Wallet. You will be able to use it in apps like Google Pay and on the web via Chrome Autocomplete. It's not just a way to store credit and rewards cards. You can keep your transit cards, proof of vaccinations, tickets to events, and even your government-issued ID and car keys in Wallet.

Older versions of the app had similar ambitions, but now other companies are ready to give people digital cards and identification to use the app. Some hotels are willing to give digital room keys, and some state governments in the US are working on issuing digital driver's licenses. Apple has been working on adding these kinds of use cases to its own wallet app, which seems very similar to the one offered by Google. Since Apple has been pushing this kind of experience for years, it's possible that Google has some catching up to do.

• Google says that other apps can integrate with Wallet, letting them provide real-time information for things like boarding passes. Image: Google
• It also sees Wallet as a place to store all of your identifications. Image: Google

Bill Ready, the president of commerce and payments for the company, said in an interview that timing and context matter. He said that companies and other institutions want to provide users with a way to store their info digitally, and that is one of the places they can do that with the help of the new Google wallet. He thinks that the company is trying to build a bed of open ecosystems, which will open up a lot of new use cases.

Ready talked about the integration of the wallet with the maps. You can see how much money is left on your transit pass when you look at possible routes in Maps, and you can also see how much a ride will cost. If you don't have enough on your pass to cover fares, Maps will let you top it up with a payment card stored in the app.

Ready said that transit providers were some of the most enthusiastic organizations when it came to digital identity. Ready thinks that companies won't have to pay to integrate into Wallet because of the open-ecosystem approach that Ready thinks will help.

Image: Google

In a lot of countries, the Google Pay app is becoming a wallet. In the US and Singapore, Pay will be a payments-centered app that helps people pay friends and save and manage money.

It makes a lot of sense for Wallet to be a separate app that integrates into other apps. Many of the features that are promised for Wallet are currently available in other places, but they don't fit in with what I'm used to.

It's nice to be able to manage all your cards in one place, like you can with a physical wallet, and it's also great to have a place to store your cards. You'll be able to access some of the information you put in it on other platforms, unlike Pay, which is only going to be onAndroid to start. Digital IDs are likely to be locked to a single device.