[buro9]

Google Pay ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... ) can store my Tate and National Trust membership cards, my EU COVID passport (proof of vaccination and booster), as well as boarding passes. And it's smart enough to expire out cards from the pass as expired memberships or flights that have flown.

Anything that can be represented in a barcode or QR code can be stored in it. Which of course turns out to be a lot of things, payments are just one part of it.

Edit: added link, but it's preinstalled on most modern Android devices.

[awiesenhofer]

How did you get your EU Covid pass added if i may ask? On my brand new Samsung phone it only lets me add predefined cards, most of which are quite useless (ie. Various US Transit Cards)

[oezi]

When I search for Wallet in the Play Store I don't even find a "Google Wallet" app nor do I find it on my Android phone.

My experience with managing boarding passes in Android is absolutely abysmal because Android does not support pkpass (the format Apple uses).

[buro9]

Pkpass appears to be an Apple defined spec that isn't owned by a neutral party like a standards organisation. Yes they've published the definition ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us... ) but why would other companies embrace a definition and then entrench that when Apple could change it at any time or lock them out of future revisions?

If an airliner is only making boarding passes available in pkpass, then ask your airliner to support more than just Apple devices. The one I flew with at the weekend "just worked".

I didn't know about this stuff before your comment as I've not yet encountered a pkpass formatted digital file. But I do see that there are conversion apps available if I did give across them. I'm just not surprised Google wouldn't adopt a non standard format.

[the_other]

> Pkpass appears to be an Apple defined spec that isn't owned by a neutral party like a standards organisation. Yes they've published the definition ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us... ) but why would other companies embrace a definition and then entrench that when Apple could change it at any time or lock them out of future revisions?

That's overly paranoid, and the defensiveness leads to self-defeat.

There's no incentive for Apple to change the spec confrontationally like that, especially if more people use it. People will stop buying or using their products.

From my perspective, no-one's using this ticketing spec any more because of this fear. You have to download apps for all the services you want and view your tickets/passes/cards in those apps. Very view companies export just the card/ticket without an app (when some of them started out doing this), and increasingly they just keep the ticket in their app. The only thing that seems to consistently work for more than a couple of years are my bank cards - presumably because I can pay with contactless.

Those services which have given up using Wallet are now harder to use and less appealing. They create friction and dissatisfaction with every transaction. And now I don't trust Apple Wallet any more (in terms of being useful). I actually feel freer to leave the Apple ecosystem now than I ever have done because nothing works as well as promised. (The two things keeping me with Apple are not Apple benefits, but Google's failings: surveillance based business model and that their ecosystem looks worse still).

[oezi]

For me Google's main issue is security updates. My 2 1/2 year old Pixel 3 is effectively trash because they only provided 3 years of security updates.

[aaaaaaaaata]

https://grapheneos.org/releases#blueline-stable

[snotrockets]

> If an airliner is only making boarding passes available in pkpass, then ask your airliner to support more than just Apple devices. The one I flew with at the weekend "just worked".

And I'd get the same reply I get when I ask for an upgrade.

[oezi]

But what do you mean with "just worked"? Where did the pass show up?

[buro9]

The airline app offered a button to add the boarding pass to Google Wallet, I pressed the button (because airline apps are slow, and a local asset would be more reliable) and it appeared in Google Pay and everything went smoothly. The airport barcode scanner worked, the boarding gate scanner worked. More... the entry in Google Pay was updated with the gate number and notified me of the change, and the flight departure time was updated. Even the priority boarding is reflected on it which allowed me access to the first queue. Links from the boarding pass went to "Booking management" and also "Flight status detail".

It literally "just worked". It was intuitive too... I'd not seen it before and knew where to find everything.

I hadn't seen the functionality before (but haven't travelled in ages), and everything I would reasonably hope for from it was there working flawlessly. Even this morning when I looked at it I see it's moved into the "Expired passes" section as I would expect from a flight in the past.

Similar for the COVID pass in Google Pay... it was accepted at KubeCon, it was accepted at the Canadian border, it was accepted at the Spain border. Everything "just worked".

Google Wallet is likely fully implemented in the Google Pay app today, and the change is going to be a rebranding just to let people know you can do more than just pay for things. I don't work for Google or hold shares, all of this stuff is just me using the product as a user... it all works great for me, YMMV etc.

[oezi]

I never download Airline apps so there isn't a way to add passes to Google Pay for me.

Let's see if wallet changes this.

[chillax]

Coming Soon.. https://wallet.google/

I think it was announced at Google IO a week or two ago.