I know the common joke is that Google made a mess of their messaging apps. I 100% am not clear what the correct app is to be able to do tap to pay from my phone. Kind of comical how hard that is to figure out.
The more fundamental issue was that the first iteration of gPay was born from Tez, which was explicitly created by Google's NBU (Next Billion Users) team led by Cesar Sengupta out of Singapore, for the Indian market with UPI compliance. It was extremely well-received and that justified the investments to port it to the US and some EMEA markets. But those markets already had Google Wallet for storing cards and because of how siloed product teams historically are at Google, there ended up being parallel tracks for GWallet & GPay.
As far as I can tell, a couple of years ago attempts were made to merge the key features of the two, at which point there was a time where US users had access to both gPay & gWallet. Now, it's come mostly full circle and Google's got most of the non-P2P features from gPay into gWallet and is deprecating gPay.
It'll be interesting to see if they add P2P to gWallet. I like to think so, but on the other hand I'm perfectly happy continuing to have a half dozen (not quite) other apps for the same purpose. CashApp, Venmo, Zelle, Paypal, not to mention the other platform apps that have P2P built in.
The curve is that Google Pay is the app I used to get credit cards onto my phone way back when. Is also the app that used to come up if I wanted to select which card to tap to pay with.
Not understanding. What part is hard to figure out? The UI is literally that you tap your phone! There is no "app".
You only run the "Wallet" app UI if you want to mess with payment details, and even then it's integrated with all the other account payment stuff. So if you tried to sign up for more Drive space or ad-free youtube or whatever you've already done it. And in the worst case if you tap and you don't have it set up, it pops up automatically and prompts you.
Your complaint seems to be limited to the fact that they used an app name ("GPay") for something other than NFC payments. But... so what?
There is an app that you can use to manage your cards but you can also manage them on the web, where by nature Google is of two minds so you can use wallet.google.com or payments.google.com. The difference between these seems to be a UI with rounded corners vs. one with sharp corners on dialog boxes. On one of these sites you can check your Google Pay balance and on the other you can check you Google Play balance. Not confusing.
The app is, and has always been, "Wallet". The cancelled app was a peer payment thing to compete with Venmo, it wasn't about payment handling. Nor was it about NFC payment device handling, which hasn't changed either.
I distinctly remember adding it to the Google Pay app at some point in the past.
Checking my phone now, I see that i don't have Google Wallet, and instead there is an unbranded Wallet that may be on my phone? Just, what the actual F? Are those the same thing? If Wallet is a generic thing on my phone, do I want Google Wallet, which Google Pay is telling me I should be using to manage my credit cards, now?
As mentioned, there are multiple ways to access payment processing. Most people don't go to an app on their phone, they do it at the point of sale, likely by following a link from Drive or YouTube or TV or whatever to the web UI (pay.google.com in fact redirects to wallet.google.com).
But the core secrets management and NFC handling app on your phone is and has been "Wallet", and the fact that you claim to be confused about that now is just evidence that you've never needed to use this UI because it Just Works.
The nonsense in this thread is about this "GPay" app, which is not and never was a payments management app. It was a peer payment service, itself based on Wallet. And no one was ever confused about it until they needed an excuse to yell on HN. They just didn't use it much, I guess, so it's been cancelled.
The confusion is because "Android Wallet" was renamed to "Google Pay" quite a few years back, and only last year was renamed back to "Google Wallet". GPay was a separate app, yes, but it also linked directly into "Google Pay" for card management.
It certainly has not "always been" Wallet. First there was Android Pay, then Google Pay, then Wallet. This doesn't include their weird little market-specific side quests which included Google Wallet (a different app to the aforementioned Google Wallet), Google Pay Send, Tez and Google Pay (different to the aforementioned Google Pay, the one this article is about).
