Category: Google Pay

After an update to their own app last week, Southwest Airlines will now let you save your boarding passes for flights to Google Pay.  It means that you will have one place to go for your boarding passes, purchasing and money transfers on your Android phone.  Southwest is the first airline to support this feature, which has been rumored to be coming down the pike for weeks.  It follows light rail transit tickets in Las Vegas and Portland being supported in the tap-to-pay app last month.

If you have upcoming flights on Southwest, you can view your boarding pass in their app and you will see the option to add the boarding pass to Google Pay.  Tap that button and your boarding pass will now appear in the Rewards & Gift Cards section of the app.

A new update to the Google Pay app is rolling out in the Google Play Store today.  While the update itself, version 1.57 for those keeping score at home, doesn’t bring a lot of excitement on the surface, there are some potentially exciting things in the code that could bring big improvements to the app.

A teardown of the app by the team over at Android Police points to code within the Google Pay app where airline boarding passes could be supported.  This would allow for the Pay app to be the center of your travel, not just a tap-to-pay app.  Given that the app already supports some transit tickets with more coming, supporting airline boarding passes isn’t a big stretch.

When Android Pay was rebranded and revamped as Google Pay, it known that public transportation tickets would eventually make their way into the tap-to-pay app.  Now the first one has arrived in Las Vegas.

Starting today, you can purchase tickets for the Las Vegas Monorail online and have it added to your Pay wallet.  Then, when you get to a pay station, just tap your phone to the terminal like any other purchase.  When the gate turns green, go through the gate and your fare will be deducted from your balance.

The start to 2018 has been busy for the Google Pay team and today is another example of it.  61 new financial institutions have added support for the tap-to-pay service, bringing to total number of banks and credit unions supporting it to just shy of 1200 (1193 to be exact).

As has become the norm over the past several months, these new institutions are smaller, regional ones.  At this point, it is more of a question of which banks are not supporting Google Pay as that number would be significantly smaller.

Google Pay, the rebranded merging of Google Wallet and Android Pay, is going live today.  With a new app rolling out and a rebranding of another… wait, I thought there was only going to be one app?  Yeah… we’ll get there.

First, Google Pay is the rebranding of Android Pay and that app is going live in the Play Store today according to the company’s blog.  If you have Android Pay installed on your phone, you will get an OTA update to the new app over the course of the next few days.  Regardless of which one you have installed right now, you can still go and use it.  This, to an extent, is a rebranding exercise at this point.

If there were doubts in your mind about the growth of Google Pay, formerly Android Pay, halting in the new year, rest easy.  Kicking off 2018 right, the pay service from Google added 80 new institutions today to the roster that support the service with their debit and credit cards.  With these new additions, there are now a whopping 1,196 banks and credit unions that support Google Pay.

The new additions, as has been the case for a while now under the Android Pay moniker, are mostly regional and local institutions.  The big national banks supported the service in the early days.