Although Google Pay was generally superseded by Google Wallet in 2022, it is still in use in a number of nations, including the US. Today, in an effort to streamline its payment options, the search giant declared that the standalone Pay app will no longer be available in the United States as of June 4, 2024. Due to the “unique needs in those countries,” Google stated in a blog post that it will only be accessible in Singapore and India after that.
Google will be discontinuing peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, balance management, and “find offers and deals” as part of the deprecation. It suggests utilizing the new offers destination on Search for the latter case. It is still possible for users to use the Google Pay website to transfer their Google Pay (GPay) balance to a bank account after June 4, 2024.
Google Wallet has now largely replaced GPay, with five times as many users in 180 countries, the company said. That’s because it can handle more than just payments — on top of credit and debit cards, it stores transport passes, state IDs, driver’s licenses, virtual car keys and more. Google Pay, the service, will still be available through Google Wallet.
Google’s payment system has been a mess over the years. It started off as Google Wallet, which was launched in 2011. At the time, it was a tap-to-pay system that came out years ahead of Apple Pay (2014), supported by Mastercard and retailers like Macy’s.
Meanwhile, Android Pay came out in 2015, then that was integrated with Google Wallet in 2018 and rebranded as Google Pay. In addition, the company originally had a Google Wallet card (killed in 2016) that was effectively a prepaid debit card usable with any retailers that accepted Mastercard. Now everything is back under the Google Wallet umbrella — unless the company changes its mind again.
Correction, February 23, 2024, 10:30AM ET: This post has been updated to clarify that only the standalone Google Pay app is shutting down in the US, not the actual service. It will still be available through Google Wallet moving forward.
