Google has announced this morning an update to the Google Pay app for Android devices. Critically, this update will bring the ability to send or receive funds from friends & family within the app, effectively killing the Google Pay Send app.
If you recall, when Android Pay was rebranded Google Pay back in February, the ability to send and receive money was moved to a separate app with the Mountain View company indicating that this was a temporary thing. The plan all along was to have Google Pay as your single payment app and that appears to be rolling out now.
In addition, airline boarding passes and event tickets are now being integrated into Pay. Starting with Southwest Airlines, you can now have your boarding pass show up in the Passes tab section of the app along with event tickets from vendors like Eventbright and Ticketmaster. Personally, the ability to have boarding passes is a must given how impressive Apple handles this already. This is an area Android is very much behind so it is good to see it finally starting to catch up. Obviously there is growing room given that Southwest is the only airline on board (pardon the pun) right now.
Google Pay Boarding Passes and Event Tickets
Finally, as I posted on yesterday, this is all tied together with the new Material Design look of the Pay site. You can now see purchases on your laptop as well as your phone (Android or iOS) and they are sync’d in real time.
What isn’t clear from the Blog post on this is if this is a cloud-side only update or also involves an app update. It seems to indicate this is all on Google side and that this will all just show up in the Google Pay app once the update is pushed to your account. When I checked my Pay app this morning, which is version 1.59.201354777, I still did not have the ability to send funding. It linked me to Google Pay Send to make that happen.
Once it is determined what type of update this is for everyone, I’ll update this post.
