Slashdot Mirror
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."
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".
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.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
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.
... 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.
"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.
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?
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.