Google’s idea with Wallet is to make a one-stop solution for all digital items. Perhaps with pretty much everything now becoming digital, the company wants the Wallet app to replace your physical wallet. It can store your credit and debit cards and make payments, like any other payment app. But on top of that, Wallet can also store loyalty cards, gift cards, flight tickets, boarding passes, transit passes, vaccine certificates, concert tickets, ID cards such as digital driving licenses, and even digital car keys. All in all, Wallet is an upgrade over Google Pay and it makes sense for the company to replace the latter with the former. You can continue to make contactless payments the same way while being able to store a lot more digital items. However, this replacement isn’t happening everywhere. In the US and Singapore, Google will offer both Wallet and GPay. Note that GPay is different from Google Pay. Originally developed for India, the latter not only lets you make contactless transactions but also peer-to-peer (P2P) payments. GPay is hugely popular in India and Google isn’t replacing it with Wallet there. Perhaps the new Wallet experience isn’t arriving in the country at all. Apart from these three countries, Google Wallet will replace Google Pay in all 40 countries where the latter is available. The rollout has already begun in 39 of those, with Japan joining soon. The replacement should be live for all eligible users over the next few days.
Google Wallet is replacing Google Pay in most countries
If you’re using Google Pay in one of the 40 countries listed on the left side of the image below (via), you should be getting an update to Google Wallet soon. You can check for the update on the Play Store. If you’re in the US and Singapore, Wallet will be available to you as a separate app in the coming weeks. Adding your payment cards and transit passes to Google Wallet is fairly easy. You can do so from within the app. But to add your flight boarding passes, event tickets, and other digital items, you will need to follow specific links. Support for digital driving licenses, state IDs, etc. will arrive with a future update.
