The Wear OS app gets updated ahead of the arrival of new functionality, later this year
Google’s confusing approach to all things wireless-payment and card-management is hopefully starting to sort itself out, and most recently that’s taken the form of the big push back towards Google Wallet branding. Earlier this week we saw Wallet taking the place of Pay on the phones of users in many countries, and today we get word of the same transition hitting Wear OS.
Smartwatch users will see the G Pay icon replaced with Wallet’s titular wallet. Fictionally we’re not picking up on any differences here, and the app appears the same as always — there’s even the same G Pay logo up top.
Back at I/O 2022, when Google was laying out its master plan for Wallet, there was lots of big talk about feature parity between the Wear OS and smartphone editions of the app — though the company did sound like it was trying to temper our expectations at the time. Indeed, in its announcement today Google confirms that any additional functionality is still waiting for a future release — at least we get a bit of a timeline, informed to look for progress before the end of 2022. That should include not just support for more types of digital content, but also a geographical expansion of Waller for Wear OS to users in more countries.
In addition to the availability of Wallet on Wear OS, today Google also seems to be pushing its Wallet changes to lots more Android phones around the world.
