Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Wallet may soon make it easier to add cards and passes by allowing you to add more than one at once.
- It looks like the app is getting read to scan photos saved to your phone for passes capable of being imported.
- Right now, none of this is functional, but the feature might arrive in a future Wallet release.
OK, so you consider yourself pretty down with Google and its services. You send all your mail through Gmail, you’ve got all your pics saved to the cloud in Photos, and you keep your life organized with Calendar. You probably even have your credit card saved to Google Wallet. But is that all you use it for? If you’ve yet to take full advantage of what Wallet offers, Google may be working on a change that could make getting started easier than ever.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
In addition to payment cards, Wallet supports all manner of passes and cards: loyalty programs, event tickets, IDs, and even your vaccination record. Over time, Google’s been expanding that list to include more and more of the stuff you’d normally carry around in your physical wallet, most recently adding an “Everything else” option that lets you import pretty much any text-based card.
If all of this sounds appealing to you, but you’ve just never gotten around to sitting down, going through your wallet, and manually adding all that stuff to Wallet, we’ve got what could be some good news. As we were investigating the changes in Wallet’s new 24.35.672648184 build, we spotted the presence of several text strings that appear to reference work on a feature for adding cards in bulk:
Code
<string name="bulk_import_acknowledgement_accept_button">I’m in</string>
<string name="bulk_import_acknowledgement_cancel_button">No, thanks</string>
<string name="bulk_import_acknowledgement_title">Bulk import acknowledgement page</string>
<string name="bulk_import_review_add_button">Add</string>
<string name="bulk_import_review_title">Add passes</string>
<string name="bulk_import_tip_action">Get started</string>
<string name="bulk_import_tip_title">Add passes from photos on this device</string>So far, we’ve yet to be able to activate any of this and get to see the tool in action, but based on the messages we find here, it looks like Wallet will be able to scan through pictures you’ve taken with your phone’s camera for any containing the sort of cards and passes supported by Wallet. And for anyone worried about privacy, it seems pretty clear here that this function will be opt-in, and you’ll need to explicitly sign off on it rummaging through your pics for cards.
