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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."
But it is!
Google had some competing thing of paypal, for credit cards I used quite often and they retired that too years ago. It was something I used quite frequently.
They retired that too. Thing was my business depended on it and it took a while to find a nonpaypal solution.
All this type of stuff does is remind me to not rely on google for merchant options. Business want stability.
Google do everything with Wallet quietly. I bet a good chunk of Android users don't even know Wallet exists because Google never market it, which is a shame because it actually works really well.
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".
Why opposed instead of "in addition to"? They are both garbage, for similar reasons.
Which would be 'a terminal, but on a computer'.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Wallet uses the same terminals.
Yes, they do. Who ever said otherwise? Leave that poor straw man alone.
Drink cool-aid much?
No, I don't drink kool-aid much. It taste like shit.
Haha bolding fail on my part.
This is just killing a very small function in wallet that mostly no one was using anyway. It does not in any way kill Google Wallet NFC payments or Wallet itself.
According to sources, Google code hosting will get killed off early next year. Go (the language) is moving to git and github, which also hosts most (if not all) of Google's other open source code.
Who could imagine that source forge would outlast them! Of course, I'm not sure why source forge is still a thing, either. Maybe the domain is set to auto-renew and nobody noticed the bill.
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Wallet uses the same terminals.
Yes, they do. Who ever said otherwise? Leave that poor straw man alone.
Drink cool-aid much?
No, I don't drink kool-aid much. It taste like shit.
You have to add water and sugar.
Don't buy the version that says "no sugar needed!", it has terrible tasting artificial sweeteners.
Don't buy the pre-mixed boxes/puoches. They taste terrible.
Don't attempt to drink the powder straight.
I spent a lot of time coding a good checkout solution that worked with Google Checkout, so I was pretty mad when all the work I did went down the drain when they discontinued it. I was fortunate to had already integrated Paypal and Amazon checkout before it was discontinued, so the business impact was pretty small.
But it did teach me to be 10 times more careful when investing time to integrate with a third party platform.
But this also shows an interesting trend away from APIs and "Mashups." 5 to 10 years ago, providing an API for your startup was considered an essential way to promote your platform by having it integrated all over the place. I suspect too many developers got burned in the way that I was with Google Checkout, and stopped trying to "mashup" APIs to the point where there was no longer much benefit to provide them.
Haha, your post gave me a chuckle. If I do ever want to drink Kool-Aid again for some reason I will take your advice. :-)
Nobody commenting that this is simply for the purchase of DIGITAL goods? Your shitty eZine has to get paid for some other way.
Real goods can continue to use Google Wallet.
Why would that require shutting down the API?
Here yesterday, gone today.
... for the google product graveyard.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
Sugar drinks taste terrible in general, unless you've been drinking them your whole life and have gotten used to the taste.
"Googled" seems to be a word that is mutating.
Used to be it was used as "She googled for the answer, and the link was on top of the results."
Now, it's more like "You've been googled, I'm so sorry that happened to you."
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
0% market share -- you know, except every NFC enabled POS terminal, vending machine, or electric car charger.
Most grocery stores, many chain convenience stores, nearly every Coke machine with a credit card reader...
True, but they kill the exact small function that was the only one I'm utilizing. I understand why - nobody is using it anyways. My online game (below) is taking payments in a few different formats, plus a few more I'm planning or working on, but frankly speaking, it's PayPal and then nothing for a very long time. I think one person purchased game credits with Google Wallet this year. Two more paid with Bitcoin. Everyone else uses PayPal. Yes, people ask for other options, but generally they ask "do you have something else except PayPal?", and not for something specific else. They just don't like PayPal.
But Google Wallet, for my case, was not even worth the time it took to integrate it. I can completely understand why they kill this function.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I no longer have faith in ANY of the conglomerates offering products all over the board.
Any conglomerate? What about 3M? They make a ton of stuff across the board and I buy a lot of their products (Scotch Tape, Post-It Notes, Scotch Brights, Nexcare & ACE bandages...) and honestly the only product I can think of that they dropped that I used a lot was their floppy disks... and they didn't really drop their floppy disk line they just sold it off as a separate company (Imation) and I was able to keep buying those floppy disks until floppys were pretty much dead and I no longer had any need for them.
When a conglomerate is well managed it actually works great, the problem is a lot of tech companies have tunnel vision and don't know how to manage a conglomerate.
Pretty much everything on your list of stuff that got dropped was in the category of:
1) Very few people used it in the first place (Wave, Buzz, Orkut, Reader)
2) Was not really dropped but replaced with a similar service under a different name with a method of migration (Picasa got integrated into Drive for all practical purposes, and actually technically G+ replaced Buzz)
The only thing I'm not sure about is Google Health - although remnants of that have been getting integrated into Android lately.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"That leaves Google Wallet as a payment solution for Google Play."
No, it leaves Google Wallet is a valid payment option everywhere that there's an NFC-enabled POS terminal, and, frankly, everywhere that takes a regular old swipe card, since you can get a physical Google card too.
https://support.google.com/wal...
Google Checkout was widely used, until it was transitioned to the wallet branding and then killed. As a former google checkout user for digital goods I wasn't even aware that I could've been using wallet still.
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it's discontinuing a service that nobody uses
That strikes me as an incredibly poor choice just as Apple is starting to allow users to do exactly that same thing via ApplePay... you can already see how well it works with app store purchases. My online buying will now lean heavily to using ApplePay where possible primarily because I don't have to give the merchant a CC number.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you hit the back button Newegg at the "verified by Visa" page Newegg will process the order without it. I have done this a half a dozen times since neither Newegg or the card company will fix it.
As it's already been said, Wallet NFC and the user app are not going anywhere. It just makes no sense to have a product that takes a cut from vendors, when you can now send mony by email (via Wallet) to anyone for free. Thus a dedicated api for 3rd party purchases no longer makes sense.
Completely agree, its why I don't get too exiteed about new Google products as they have no loyalty to their own products. I loved Google Pages (hated its replacement) and Buzz
It's sad, I really liked Picasa. The others were crap though.
You heard it here first, folks. Lemonade tastes terrible! Coke tastes terrible! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!