Technology - Google News

Google Wallet rolls out to users, will live alongside Google Pay in the US - Ars Technica

Posted: 18 Jul 2022 01:48 PM PDT

Today is apparently the launch day for Google Wallet—Google's fourth rebrand of its payment system. Users on Reddit report the app has rolled out to them, and a version has popped up on APKMirror if you want to sideload. Google also launched a ton of support pages today relating to Wallet.

Google Wallet was announced at Google I/O 2022, and brings back the original Google payments product name. Wallet was originally around from 2011-2015, then it became Android Pay, then Google Pay in 2018, and now Wallet is back in 2022. Google's turbulent payment products have never been worse than right now, where the sort-of-outgoing product, Google Pay, has been on the market for just over a year.

While the Google Pay brand has been around longer than a year, Google pushed out a completely new codebase in March 2021. This new version of Google Pay used the codebase of "Google Tez," a payments product developed for India. Compared to the older Google Pay, New Google Pay had a ton of feature regressions, like losing support for logging into multiple devices, no support for multiple accounts, and no compatibility with anything that didn't have a SIM card, which meant the Google Pay website had to be stripped of functionality.

The Tez Google Pay rollout was a disaster that kicked off an employee exodus, and the cancellation of public plans to launch Google bank accounts. It's now a year later, and it seems like most of the people involved in the Tez Google Pay rollout have left Google, and now the old app is back with a new coat of paint.

Google will have one payment app in most of the world, except for the US and Singapore.
Google

The package name for Google Wallet is "com.google.android.apps.walletnfcrel," which means Google Wallet is an in-place upgrade for the old Google Pay app, the one Google forced users in the US to uninstall about one year ago. It would be great if Google just rolled back everything to the old codebase, but that's not what's happening, at least, not in the US. Internationally, Google has a great rollout plan for Google Wallet. The disastrous New Google Pay (Tez) rollout only happened in the US and Singapore, so internationally there's just the old Google Pay (walletnfcrel), and that's getting replaced with Google Wallet. One app will be able to handle all of your Google Payment duties, like tap-and-pay and sending money to contacts.

In the US and Singapore, Google doesn't seem willing to clean up the mess it made last year and wants the New Google Pay and Google Wallet apps to live alongside each other. In all cases, it's actually Google Play Services that handles tap-and-pay, while in the US, New Google Pay will handle P2P payments (the feature that it is exceptionally bad at, due to things like no multiple account support). That leaves Google Wallet to... show loyalty cards? Be a shortcut for Google Play Services? Wallet does not have a lot to do right now.

Consequently, there's not much to see in Wallet right now, just a normal NFC card interface, some loyalty cards, and a metro card search. The non-money parts of Wallet are the things Wallet will focus on in the future. Today, Wallet will scan your email to find membership cards, and mine found cards I wasn't even aware I still had, like a Best Buy loyalty card that hasn't been used for probably 15 years. You can add student IDs, COVID-19 vaccination cards, metro cards, and someday, the app plans to support digital driver's licenses and car keys.

Listing image by Google

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Slack is increasing prices and changing the way its free plan works - TechCrunch

Posted: 18 Jul 2022 03:48 PM PDT

Slack, the chat platform that serves as an online watercooler for oh-so-many teams, is bumping up its monthly price and changing the way its free plan works.

The company announced the changes via blog post this afternoon.

Here's what's changing:

If you pay for the "Pro" plan by the month, the price will increase from $8 per user per month to $8.75 per user per month.
If you pay for the "Pro" plan by the year, the price will increase from $6.67 per user per month to $7.25 per user per month.
If you're on the free plan, they're changing the way/duration messages are saved. Previously, free Slacks would show the last 10,000 messages and 5 GB worth of uploads. Moving forward it'll be based on time rather than amount, with Slack showing the last 90 days of messages/uploads regardless of how much or how little is sent.

(Prices above are for U.S. users, but it'll increase worldwide; the price change chart for other countries is available here.)

Slack notes that the pricing changes only impact "Pro" plan users, so teams on the Business+ plan (which currently costs $12.50 or $15 per user per month) or custom enterprise plans do not seem to be impacted.

Slack says the pricing change — which it says is the "first price increase since [Slack] first launched in 2014" — will go into effect as of September 1st, 2022. The company's blog post also notes that you can lock in the existing price for an additional year by renewing before September.

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