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I'd be very curious to hear the true story as well. As an outsider, it looks like a classic process followed by many tech companies. GPay was probably the firs

I'd be very curious to hear the true story as well. As an outsider, it looks like a classic process followed by many tech companies. GPay was probably the first attempt and the assignment was to build anything that works and just make it work in the US - we'll expand to other markets later. And then, because it's payments, they immediately learned that every assumption they made in the model fails to work in any other jurisdiction. No idea why Singapore - maybe that was the first attempt at expansion where they learned supporting other regions wasn't going to scale. From there, maybe they built Google Pay based on better assumptions that apply globally. But, of course, nobody bothered to tell the GPay team who kept cranking out new features in the meantime. Lo and behold, Google Pay could never reach feature parity with GPay so they perpetually have to support GPay in the US, while deploying Google Pay to the rest of the world. But now we have to manage two apps. We'd better just build a brand new app to replace both. Enter: Wallet. It supports every region with all the critical features. Oh, except Wallet's model can't ever support those 20-year old legacy APIs that are still used by tons of products nobody owns. So actually people who use GPay now get both GPay and Wallet. That's my guess, at least...

nl 4y ago
There's some backstory in here: >"Caesar [Sengupta] leaving was the capstone on a lot of frustration felt by employees. The product wasn't growing at the rate we wanted it to." Sengupta departed Google one month after killing the old Google Pay and making his new app mandatory for all users in the US. > The new Google Pay app launched in November 2020 in the US, and for about four months, Google was running two "Google Pay" apps: the old Google Pay (which had been around since 2011, first as Google Wallet, then Android Pay, then Google Pay) and this new Google Pay, which was a ground-up rewrite the company started for the Indian market. April 2021 capped off the final death of the old Google Pay service, which had been winding down since January. The two services were both called "Google Pay," but other than that, they weren't related in terms of features, contacts, or accounts. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/google-pay-team-reportedly-in-major-upheaval-after-botched-app-revamp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/google-pay-team-repo... Further reading: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastrous-year-continues-promised-bank-account-feature-is-dead/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastro... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-loses-two-execs-one-for-messaging-and-workspace-another-for-payments/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-loses-two-exe...

nl 4y ago

There's some backstory in here: >"Caesar [Sengupta] leaving was the capstone on a lot of frustration felt by employees. The product wasn't growing at the rate we wanted it to." Sengupta departed Google one month after killing the old Google Pay and making his new app mandatory for all users in the US. > The new Google Pay app launched in November 2020 in the US, and for about four months, Google was running two "Google Pay" apps: the old Google Pay (which had been around since 2011, first as Google Wallet, then Android Pay, then Google Pay) and this new Google Pay, which was a ground-up rewrite the company started for the Indian market. April 2021 capped off the final death of the old Google Pay service, which had been winding down since January. The two services were both called "Google Pay," but other than that, they weren't related in terms of features, contacts, or accounts. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/google-pay-team-reportedly-in-major-upheaval-after-botched-app-revamp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/google-pay-team-repo... Further reading: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastrous-year-continues-promised-bank-account-feature-is-dead/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastro... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-loses-two-execs-one-for-messaging-and-workspace-another-for-payments/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-loses-two-exe...