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I forgot where it was mentioned [1] that the mess comes from a poor management of international feature list. In particular, Google wanted it to be successful

I forgot where it was mentioned [1] that the mess comes from a poor management of international feature list. In particular, Google wanted it to be successful in India. But the prior app was designed with USA sensibilities and requirements. Such as, oh, requiring an email and Google account! The thought was that this wouldn't fly in India, and it had to work with just a phone number. I'm sure there were perverse/crossed incentives on delivery deadlines that lead the leadership team to decide that completely breaking the existing flow/splitting the userbase was the way forward. [1] Perhaps this Ars Technica article from 2022: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-wallet-rolls-out-to-users-will-live-alongside-google-pay-in-the-us/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-wallet-rolls-...

mikymoothrowa 3y ago
Google had a very successful payments app called Tez in India. They merged that into Google pay during a flutter rewrite so that they can say things like “Google pay has 200 million users in 120 countries” even though all 200 million of those were in India. In India, Google pay is a client for the UPI platform. You could send money from Google pay to Whatsapp pay for example.
throw_this_1234 3y ago
Requiring a Google account would indeed not fly. The project was called next billion users and it's objective was to seek internet penetration into areas of India where internet literacy is nonexistent. As a part of that initiative you had manufacturers building super low-cost Android smartphones that came preloaded with Google apps and people could put a SIM card in. The backing system of GPay in India called UPI works similarly so this app could never have that second layer of auth as a mandatory wrapper and spread where Google wanted it to spread. Those decisions gave them 200M users on the app in the country.

mikymoothrowa 3y ago

Google had a very successful payments app called Tez in India. They merged that into Google pay during a flutter rewrite so that they can say things like “Google pay has 200 million users in 120 countries” even though all 200 million of those were in India. In India, Google pay is a client for the UPI platform. You could send money from Google pay to Whatsapp pay for example.

throw_this_1234 3y ago

Requiring a Google account would indeed not fly. The project was called next billion users and it's objective was to seek internet penetration into areas of India where internet literacy is nonexistent. As a part of that initiative you had manufacturers building super low-cost Android smartphones that came preloaded with Google apps and people could put a SIM card in. The backing system of GPay in India called UPI works similarly so this app could never have that second layer of auth as a mandatory wrapper and spread where Google wanted it to spread. Those decisions gave them 200M users on the app in the country.