GoKawiilJoe Maring / Android Authority
On my Pixel phone, there are many Google-made apps that are not just essential to the way I live and work, but completely impossible for me to let go of. Calendar has all my important meetings and upcoming events; Chrome has my entire browsing history and research; Gmail is, well, Gmail; Meet is how I video call my parents; Maps is how I can move around my new home, Paris, without getting lost; and Photos is where all my memories and all my life are summed up in perfectly categorized albums and tagged faces and places. There are more, too, but if you asked me about the most essential Google-made app for me today, it would be something else: Google Wallet. And no, not just for payments.
What's your favorite Google app? 19 votes Google Wallet 16 % Google Maps 21 % Google Photos 21 % Google Calendar 0 % Gmail 21 % Google Meet 5 % Something else (tell us in the comments) 0 % I don't really like or use Google's apps 16 %
How Google Wallet slowly won over my trust
Joe Maring / Android Authority
When I first moved to France in 2021, the bank I chose didn’t support Google Wallet. Everything I’d heard about contactless and mobile payments remained a mystery to me. Plus, it was almost baffling to me that some people would trust just their phone to pay for stuff. Just carry your card with you, isn’t that better? At the time, I didn’t even care if my phone had NFC or not — that’s how little Wallet mattered to me.
A couple of years later, though, I opened a new bank account that supported Wallet, and that’s when things started shifting. I think I was on vacation in Slovenia when I noticed that every business took contactless payments, so I just spent the entire trip using Google Wallet to tap-to-pay. It was eye-opening for a couple of reasons. One, I didn’t have to keep taking my wallet out of my backpack every time I needed to pay for something, which, when traveling and in an unfamiliar environment, felt much safer. And two, Wallet kept a running list of my payments, so I could quickly glance over them and see what I’d paid during a given day. That saved me from opening my local bank’s slow and super secure app just to do some quick mental math.
I underestimated the convenience of keeping my physical cards in my backpack while paying for things.
With time, these two advantages won me over to Google Wallet, even when I came back to France. My physical wallet always stays tucked away in a safe pocket in my backpack, which is always a benefit when living in a big, busy city.
But it was a third benefit that sealed the deal for me. My husband and I have a few separate bank accounts, but we pay for things interchangeably. He has an American Express credit card, I have a Wise card, and he has a Meal card through his work. We share these, but we’re not always together when we need to use them. Except that we can have them in Google Wallet on both of our phones and pay with them. That saves us so much from the logistics of, “Hey, I need the Meal card today,” or, “Don’t forget to take the credit card before you leave!”
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