Google Wallet arrived on our phones about a year ago, replacing Google Pay in most parts of the world except for the US and Singapore. Google’s transition details from last year left out one country, though. Japan was marked with a “coming soon,” leaving it as one of the only countries with Google Pay support to not get the Wallet treatment. About nine long months later, that’s now finally changing, as Google Japan has announced that Wallet is arriving for Google Pay users.
Google’s transition from Pay to Wallet was messy, to say the least. In the US, the Google Pay app that you can use for peer-to-peer payments and more lives on alongside the Wallet app, while in most of the rest of the world, Wallet is replacing Google Pay altogether. However, most other countries never received the new Google Pay app that you know in the US; instead, other countries were left with the old Pay app that essentially only ever offered the features Wallet now gives you in prettier garments.
Japan was singled out in Google’s original rollout scheme
Japan is one of these countries that never received the new Google Pay app that’s available in the US, but the country is only now making the jump to Wallet. As Google explains in its blog post, the Google Wallet app transition works just like it did in other parts of the world last year. Any credit, debit, or transportation cards stored in Pay are automatically moved over to Wallet. Like in other countries, the new app also makes it easier to add new loyalty cards and boarding passes, as they can be transferred automatically based on your Gmail messages (if you allow access).
It’s unclear what exactly the holdup was in Japan, but it’s good to see that Wallet is now available everywhere where you have access to Google Pay — except for India, of course, which Google provides with a different payment processing method also called Google Pay.
