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.
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.
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.
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.