Google Wallet API For Digital Goods Will Be Retired On March 2, 2015 105
An anonymous reader points out that Google plans to shut down Google Wallet API for third-party digital purchases. "Google has quietly revealed it plans to retire the Google Wallet API for digital goods on March 2, 2015. The company plans to continue supporting the sale of apps on Google Play as well as in-app payments, but users will not be able to purchase any virtual items offered on the Web through Google Wallet. We say "quietly" because there is no official announcement from Google. Furthermore, Google says it has no plans to proactively communicate the change to Google Wallet users; buyers will simply get 404 errors when trying to check out after support is pulled."
Android is winning! (Score:1)
Re:So, why the continued G-love? (Score:5, Insightful)
Much as I love Google for many things, I can no longer believe in investing time into its products - except for a handful. These few are Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Android, and of course Search. After Wave, Buzz, Picasa, Google Health, Orkut, and Google Reader, I finally realized that Google is not committed to its products. It builds potentially cool stuff, and then ignores the hell out of them. I am not interested in using the products of a company that essentially tells its users to go fuck themselves.
Even with Google+, I'm receiving signals that the company is losing interest - which is sad, because I have far better conversations with people on G+ than on Facebook. I have realized now that the future lies with companies who make dedicated products. This is the reason for example, why I use LastPass instead of the Google Chrome password manager. I never know if a day will come when Google suddenly decides to wrap up its password functionality saying "not enough users" or whatever.
I no longer have faith in ANY of the conglomerates offering products all over the board. None of them have the interest or commitment to keep working on them. I am now a firm believer in "Do ONE thing and do it DAMN well".
Re:So, why the continued G-love? (Score:4, Insightful)
The smart money is on those who do one thing, and do it just about well enough. Not good enough to get bought and taken over, not diversified enough to stop giving a crap. They're stuck making just-good-enough products for you and me to use.
and I'm only half-joking.
Re:So, why the continued G-love? (Score:5, Insightful)
Question: Have you ever actually used Google Wallet to buy digital goods from a seller other than Google?
I haven't, and I worked on Google Wallet. This doesn't surprise me at all; this facet of Google Wallet never saw significant uptake. I doubt there were more than a handful of merchants who offered it.
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Google Checkout was widely used, until it was transitioned to the wallet branding and then killed. As a former google checkout user for digital goods I wasn't even aware that I could've been using wallet still.
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Re:So, why the continued G-love? (Score:5, Informative)
I no longer have faith in ANY of the conglomerates offering products all over the board.
Any conglomerate? What about 3M? They make a ton of stuff across the board and I buy a lot of their products (Scotch Tape, Post-It Notes, Scotch Brights, Nexcare & ACE bandages...) and honestly the only product I can think of that they dropped that I used a lot was their floppy disks... and they didn't really drop their floppy disk line they just sold it off as a separate company (Imation) and I was able to keep buying those floppy disks until floppys were pretty much dead and I no longer had any need for them.
When a conglomerate is well managed it actually works great, the problem is a lot of tech companies have tunnel vision and don't know how to manage a conglomerate.
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Pretty much everything on your list of stuff that got dropped was in the category of:
1) Very few people used it in the first place (Wave, Buzz, Orkut, Reader)
2) Was not really dropped but replaced with a similar service under a different name with a method of migration (Picasa got integrated into Drive for all practical purposes, and actually technically G+ replaced Buzz)
The only thing I'm not sure about is Google Health - although remnants of that have been getting integrated into Android lately.
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Google's Paypal (Score:5, Informative)
Google had some competing thing of paypal, for credit cards I used quite often and they retired that too years ago. It was something I used quite frequently.
They retired that too. Thing was my business depended on it and it took a while to find a nonpaypal solution.
All this type of stuff does is remind me to not rely on google for merchant options. Business want stability.
Re:Google's Paypal (Score:4, Insightful)
so-called 'free applications' or services are bullshit since they can and will be pulled at any time google so chooses.
they are THEY 'short attention span' company of the decade. I can't think of anyone else who abandons their own work so frequently and after its actually launched on the public, too. abandoning things in internal field-test is fine. but once its launched, it should not be killed off without a damned good reason.
with all the brainpower (?) google has, with all their money and employee base, its amazing how much abandonware they have produced over the years.
google makes me laugh. a bunch of children who think they can engineer products. lol. it takes a lot more than just writing code and throwing it on a website to truly be a respectable product engineer. I don't know if google has ANY such people, form what I can see on the outside.
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I can't think of anyone else who abandons their own work so frequently and after its actually launched on the public, too.
I can think of one... Apple. Try bringing your $6,000+ quad-Xeon cheese-grater Mac Pro into an Apple Store for support -- the "geniuses" will all gather round to look at the fascinating museum piece, before they tell you that they can't help you with your "legacy Mac". :^P
google makes me laugh. a bunch of children who think they can engineer products. lol.
No doubt that explains why they are such a tiny company that nobody has ever heard of, with such a minuscule user base. Do I detect some sour grapes?
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I can think of one... Apple. Try bringing your $6,000+ quad-Xeon cheese-grater Mac Pro into an Apple Store for support -- the "geniuses" will all gather round to look at the fascinating museum piece, before they tell you that they can't help you with your "legacy Mac". :^P
Total bull. Just a few months ago I got my girlfriends 4 year old Air serviced at an Apple Store. I also saw other 2009-2010 era Macs being serviced as well.
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Because someone would want to buy them one? Since I never said a "4 year old's MacBook Air" and instead said "my girlfriends (yes this was a typo when I meant to say girlfriend's) 4 year old Air" you're attempt at a joke falls pretty flat.
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Because someone would want to buy them one? Since I never said a "4 year old's MacBook Air" and instead said "my girlfriends (yes this was a typo when I meant to say girlfriend's) 4 year old Air" you're attempt at a joke falls pretty flat.
You should have just stuck with the typo since it implied you have more than one girlfriend...of course they all had to share the same 4 yr old Macbook Air...but thing being /. and all...
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It would still be a typo. It would need to say "my girlfriends' 4 year old air". He would likely be some sort of cheap polygamist in Utah to make so many women share one tiny computer.
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I can think of one... Apple. Try bringing your $6,000+ quad-Xeon cheese-grater Mac Pro into an Apple Store for support -- the "geniuses" will all gather round to look at the fascinating museum piece, before they tell you that they can't help you with your "legacy Mac". :^P
To add to my statement above I checked out this claim. I entered in a serial number for an early 2008 Quad-core MacPro and it let me go through all the steps to be able to get it serviced. So I repeat what I said at first, you're statement is total bullshit.
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If you're talking about a MacPro1 that shipped in 2006, then yes, you aren't going to receive support.
I'd challenge you to find ANY hardware company that supports stuff that is 8+ years old without an annual maintenance agreement in place.
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He was clearly talking about computer hardware.
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your reply addresses nothing that I posted about.
they are not a tiny company and so, they have LESS excuses to kill off launched apps and services. 10 or 50 man company, sure, fine. but the mamoth that they are? inexcusable!
do I sense fanboi'ism at YOUR end, mate? I don't have sour grapes; I stopped supporting google and their products years ago. they fooled me once but they are never getting a 2nd chance from me.
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your reply addresses nothing that I posted about.
Of course it doesn't. They were attempting to turn it into some stupid Google v Apple thing.
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Try bringing your $6,000+ quad-Xeon cheese-grater Mac Pro into an Apple Store for support -- the "geniuses" will all gather round to look at the fascinating museum piece, before they tell you that they can't help you with your "legacy Mac". :^P
You're wrong to feel abandoned. Apple hasnt abandoned the hardware, they just are no longer offering support in that store. To be fair. It's out of warranty by several years. The thing still works, and you can get it serviced elsewhere or flip it on CL for a decent sum. It didn't vanish into the aether.
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so-called 'free applications' or services are bullshit since they can and will be pulled at any time google so chooses.
But it's not necessarily free. If it worked like Paypal, then they take a small cut off of each transaction.
Send someone $10 on Paypal, and they'll receive $9.75 (or if it's a "gift," then sender pays). That's not free. It's just that, like with credit card transactions, the cost is hidden from the purchaser.
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so-called 'free applications' or services are bullshit since they can and will be pulled at any time google so chooses.
This payment api they're retiring was far from their usual free offering. It was a payment api. It was getting a cut of every transaction.
That being said, the article is click-baiting us, it's discontinuing a service that nobody uses. Google Wallet isn't being discontinued for other goods, just digital goods. And it isn't being discontinued for in-app payments on Android, or on Google Play, only third party web sites selling digital goods with Google Wallet are going to be affected, which means practically
The Service Everyone's About To Use (Score:2)
it's discontinuing a service that nobody uses
That strikes me as an incredibly poor choice just as Apple is starting to allow users to do exactly that same thing via ApplePay... you can already see how well it works with app store purchases. My online buying will now lean heavily to using ApplePay where possible primarily because I don't have to give the merchant a CC number.
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In fact, it's double-clickbaiting us - it's claiming that the product is being retired "quietly", "without an official announcement" while simultaneously linking to the official announcement...
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with all the brainpower (?) google has, with all their money and employee base, its amazing how much abandonware they have produced over the years.
Only if you don't understand the lifecycle of business.
Look at what most of the brains within Google are doing these days. Running services and building bigger server farms. You are completely right: They're a big company, but not a grown-up company.
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Ditto for my wife's business.
Square & FreshBooks saved her bacon. Happy to pay ~$50 + $30 per month for reliable products.
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Well, except for the fact that I was relying on it, and those services weren't fully developed when they did drop them, yeah it was an easy replacement.
Business changes are never 'easy'.
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Yep, I wrote a bunch of code for Google Checkout (I think that was what it was called) and then all of a sudden it didn't work. They just up and killed it. Not trusting them again.
Google's Paypal (Score:3)
I spent a lot of time coding a good checkout solution that worked with Google Checkout, so I was pretty mad when all the work I did went down the drain when they discontinued it. I was fortunate to had already integrated Paypal and Amazon checkout before it was discontinued, so the business impact was pretty small.
But it did teach me to be 10 times more careful when investing time to integrate with a third party platform.
But this also shows an interesting trend away from APIs and "Mashups." 5 to 10 ye
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I can still request and receive money just fine from Gmail, unless you are talking about something else.
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Walled garden as opposed to Apple Pay?
How is Apple Pay a walled garden? Apple Pay interoperates perfectly fine with all other existing NFC systems.
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Wallet uses the same terminals.
Yes, they do. Who ever said otherwise? Leave that poor straw man alone.
Drink cool-aid much?
No, I don't drink kool-aid much. It taste like shit.
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Haha bolding fail on my part.
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Wallet uses the same terminals.
Yes, they do. Who ever said otherwise? Leave that poor straw man alone.
Drink cool-aid much?
No, I don't drink kool-aid much. It taste like shit.
You have to add water and sugar.
Don't buy the version that says "no sugar needed!", it has terrible tasting artificial sweeteners.
Don't buy the pre-mixed boxes/puoches. They taste terrible.
Don't attempt to drink the powder straight.
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Haha, your post gave me a chuckle. If I do ever want to drink Kool-Aid again for some reason I will take your advice. :-)
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Sugar drinks taste terrible in general, unless you've been drinking them your whole life and have gotten used to the taste.
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You heard it here first, folks. Lemonade tastes terrible! Coke tastes terrible! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!
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Why opposed instead of "in addition to"? They are both garbage, for similar reasons.
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Which would be 'a terminal, but on a computer'.
Doing Google Wallet quietly? Shocker... (Score:4, Informative)
Google do everything with Wallet quietly. I bet a good chunk of Android users don't even know Wallet exists because Google never market it, which is a shame because it actually works really well.
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from what ive read, this isnt the android app or nfc payments. it is just for payment processing part that websites can use.
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Yes, but the point stands. Google are terrible communicators when it comes to things related to Wallet.
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You mean the portion that has any significant adoption whatsoever.
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Google Wallet still has limited usefulness. NFC payments are still only supported on a tiny fraction of Android users, using a custom build of the wallet app not available in the Google play store. Only some phone distributors are given access to this custom build. My phone has android 4.4, NFC support, and Google wallet installed, but I can't do NFC payments. How do they expect to compete like that?
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My phone has android 4.4, NFC support, and Google wallet installed, but I can't do NFC payments. How do they expect to compete like that?
Huh? Google Wallet NFC payments should work on any NFC-capable device with KitKat or higher. What phone do you have, and in what way does it not work?
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Verizon Galaxy Note 3. No NFC Payments, and probably will never have them.
That's the phone my wife has, and NFC payments work fine. Did you enable NFC in the settings? When you go into the Google Wallet app what do you see about "tap and pay"?
That being said, it's not that Google doesn't want Wallet to succeed. But Carriers have screwed them over by limiting the devices to ISIS/Soft Card.
Google solved that problem by moving from SE to HCE.
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Verizon Galaxy Note 3. No NFC Payments, and probably will never have them.
That's the phone my wife has, and NFC payments work fine. Did you enable NFC in the settings? When you go into the Google Wallet app what do you see about "tap and pay"?
Ah, correction. My wife has the Note 2. It turns out that HCE payments aren't supported on NXP NFC chipsets (per XDA). The Broadcom chipsets are far more common and work fine. I don't know if this is changing for 5.0. It does seem like a pure software limitation if what I was reading is correct.
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A little more information: Some Note 3s can do HCE and some cannot. It's definitely an unusual case. Samsung decided to source NFC chipsets from both NXP and Broadcom. All Broadcom chipsets can do NFC and all of the newer NXP chipsets can as well but older ones had some bits hardwired that makes it impossible for the handset to send certain types of NFC messages. The Note 3s with NXP chips have an early version of a later-generation NXP chipset and still has that limitation, even though the final version of
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Google Wallet still has limited usefulness. NFC payments are still only supported on a tiny fraction of Android users, using a custom build of the wallet app not available in the Google play store. Only some phone distributors are given access to this custom build. My phone has android 4.4, NFC support, and Google wallet installed, but I can't do NFC payments. How do they expect to compete like that?
What terrible phone are you using?
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Google Wallet still has limited usefulness. NFC payments are still only supported on a tiny fraction of Android users, using a custom build of the wallet app not available in the Google play store. Only some phone distributors are given access to this custom build. My phone has android 4.4, NFC support, and Google wallet installed, but I can't do NFC payments. How do they expect to compete like that?
Google Wallet (installed from the standard Play Store) on my T-Mobile US HTC One (both M7 and new M8) works great paying for purchases anywhere they accept NFC payments (including Apple Pay locations). I previously used it at CVS before they turned off their NFC terminals, I use it at Panera, McDonalds, Kroger, Best Buy, Target. You're making claims that are not based in fact.
Not killing Wallet, just payment for digital goods (Score:4, Informative)
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0% market share -- you know, except every NFC enabled POS terminal, vending machine, or electric car charger.
Most grocery stores, many chain convenience stores, nearly every Coke machine with a credit card reader...
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"That leaves Google Wallet as a payment solution for Google Play."
No, it leaves Google Wallet is a valid payment option everywhere that there's an NFC-enabled POS terminal, and, frankly, everywhere that takes a regular old swipe card, since you can get a physical Google card too.
https://support.google.com/wal... [google.com]
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True, but they kill the exact small function that was the only one I'm utilizing. I understand why - nobody is using it anyways. My online game (below) is taking payments in a few different formats, plus a few more I'm planning or working on, but frankly speaking, it's PayPal and then nothing for a very long time. I think one person purchased game credits with Google Wallet this year. Two more paid with Bitcoin. Everyone else uses PayPal. Yes, people ask for other options, but generally they ask "do you hav
and nothing of value was lost (Score:4, Interesting)
According to sources, Google code hosting will get killed off early next year. Go (the language) is moving to git and github, which also hosts most (if not all) of Google's other open source code.
Who could imagine that source forge would outlast them! Of course, I'm not sure why source forge is still a thing, either. Maybe the domain is set to auto-renew and nobody noticed the bill.
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Why would that require shutting down the API?
Nobody? (Score:2)
Nobody commenting that this is simply for the purchase of DIGITAL goods? Your shitty eZine has to get paid for some other way.
Real goods can continue to use Google Wallet.
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Well, since Verizon won't update the drivers for the NFC chip in my phone (Note 3), the only way I ever use Wallet is for digital goods (mostly purchasing Humble Bundles). Guess I'll to switch to Amazon Payments (no way in hell is paypal getting my info).
Google APIs (Score:2)
Here yesterday, gone today.
Prepare another tombstone... (Score:3)
... for the google product graveyard. [slate.com]
The article is trolling; this is barely news (Score:2)
Googled (Score:2, Funny)
"Googled" seems to be a word that is mutating.
Used to be it was used as "She googled for the answer, and the link was on top of the results."
Now, it's more like "You've been googled, I'm so sorry that happened to you."
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Oh no, is Microsoft still trying to make that go viral?