Well, I kind of know what happened in that scenario… because it did. Until Pay, there was Wallet. The original Wallet, not the current one. Wallet had a physical and virtual prepaid debit card, that you would load up and manage in the app. I used it a few times (new tech woo), and distinctively remember ordering at a McDonald’s, the clerk announced the cost, I held my Nexus 7 to the new nfc pad, they started to say ‘uhh no you have to-’ and then a success beep, and their jaw dropped. They thought it was nuts, I told them in a few years ‘this will be everywhere’.
So before Pay, there was Wallet, and it’s own little sandbox of testing if anyone would use this. A couple years later the Wallet card discontinued, and Pay took its place.
A different Wallet/Pay implementation is a possible outcome, but I’m thinking of a bigger picture where Android phones are more like PCs: no non-unlockable bootloaders, no remote attestation anywhere, barriers to root detection at the OS level, third-party ROMs encouraged.
The early days of Android were like that. I wonder if things had developed along that path, would we have a paradise for power users? A security nightmare for mainstream users? Both? Neither?
Well, I kind of know what happened in that scenario… because it did. Until Pay, there was Wallet. The original Wallet, not the current one. Wallet had a physical and virtual prepaid debit card, that you would load up and manage in the app. I used it a few times (new tech woo), and distinctively remember ordering at a McDonald’s, the clerk announced the cost, I held my Nexus 7 to the new nfc pad, they started to say ‘uhh no you have to-’ and then a success beep, and their jaw dropped. They thought it was nuts, I told them in a few years ‘this will be everywhere’.
So before Pay, there was Wallet, and it’s own little sandbox of testing if anyone would use this. A couple years later the Wallet card discontinued, and Pay took its place.
A different Wallet/Pay implementation is a possible outcome, but I’m thinking of a bigger picture where Android phones are more like PCs: no non-unlockable bootloaders, no remote attestation anywhere, barriers to root detection at the OS level, third-party ROMs encouraged.
The early days of Android were like that. I wonder if things had developed along that path, would we have a paradise for power users? A security nightmare for mainstream users? Both? Neither?
Classic Google.
I remember wallet only working consistently at McDonald’s.
For most of early wallets existence it did only work McDonald’s lol