Google Wallet API For Digital Goods Will Be Retired On March 2, 2015

An anonymous reader points out that Google plans to shut down Google Wallet API for third-party digital purchases. "Google has quietly revealed it plans to retire the Google Wallet API for digital goods on March 2, 2015. The company plans to continue supporting the sale of apps on Google Play as well as in-app payments, but users will not be able to purchase any virtual items offered on the Web through Google Wallet. We say "quietly" because there is no official announcement from Google. Furthermore, Google says it has no plans to proactively communicate the change to Google Wallet users; buyers will simply get 404 errors when trying to check out after support is pulled."

Comments

Re:Google's Paypal

[TheGratefulNet]

so-called 'free applications' or services are bullshit since they can and will be pulled at any time google so chooses.

they are THEY 'short attention span' company of the decade. I can't think of anyone else who abandons their own work so frequently and after its actually launched on the public, too. abandoning things in internal field-test is fine. but once its launched, it should not be killed off without a damned good reason.

with all the brainpower (?) google has, with all their money and employee base, its amazing how much abandonware they have produced over the years.

google makes me laugh. a bunch of children who think they can engineer products. lol. it takes a lot more than just writing code and throwing it on a website to truly be a respectable product engineer. I don't know if google has ANY such people, form what I can see on the outside.

Re:So, why the continued G-love?

[bhagwad]

Much as I love Google for many things, I can no longer believe in investing time into its products - except for a handful. These few are Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Android, and of course Search. After Wave, Buzz, Picasa, Google Health, Orkut, and Google Reader, I finally realized that Google is not committed to its products. It builds potentially cool stuff, and then ignores the hell out of them. I am not interested in using the products of a company that essentially tells its users to go fuck themselves.

Even with Google+, I'm receiving signals that the company is losing interest - which is sad, because I have far better conversations with people on G+ than on Facebook. I have realized now that the future lies with companies who make dedicated products. This is the reason for example, why I use LastPass instead of the Google Chrome password manager. I never know if a day will come when Google suddenly decides to wrap up its password functionality saying "not enough users" or whatever.

I no longer have faith in ANY of the conglomerates offering products all over the board. None of them have the interest or commitment to keep working on them. I am now a firm believer in "Do ONE thing and do it DAMN well".

Re:So, why the continued G-love?

[gweilo8888]

Of course, that still leaves the problem of the company that does one thing, and damn well, then being taken over by Google, Apple, or Microsoft, at which point their product languishes unupdated or is canceled altogether, or it's turned into a new Google / Apple / Microsoft product that is abandoned a year later.

The smart money is on those who do one thing, and do it just about well enough. Not good enough to get bought and taken over, not diversified enough to stop giving a crap. They're stuck making just-good-enough products for you and me to use.

and I'm only half-joking.

Re:So, why the continued G-love?

[swillden]

Question: Have you ever actually used Google Wallet to buy digital goods from a seller other than Google?

I haven't, and I worked on Google Wallet. This doesn't surprise me at all; this facet of Google Wallet never saw significant uptake. I doubt there were more than a handful of merchants who offered it.