Google's Tez-based Google Pay relaunch flopped — a year later the Wallet brand came back

Google's payments branding had already lurched — Google Wallet from 2011 to 2015, then Android Pay, then Google Pay in 2018 — but the worst came in March 2021, when Google pushed out a completely new Google Pay built on the codebase of Tez, a payments product developed for India. The new app shipped with a pile of regressions: no multi-device login, no multiple accounts, no compatibility with anything lacking a SIM card, which stripped the Google Pay website of functionality.

Per Ars Technica, the Tez-based rollout 'was a disaster that kicked off an employee exodus and the cancellation of public plans to launch Google bank accounts.' A year later most of the people involved had left Google, and the product was being walked back.

The rollback arrived in July 2022 as a fourth rebrand: Google Wallet returned, using the package name of the old Google Pay that Google had forced US users to uninstall a year earlier. Internationally, where the Tez disaster never happened, Wallet cleanly replaced the old app as the one app for all Google payments. In the US and Singapore, Google declined to clean up the mess: the new Google Pay and Wallet now live alongside each other, with tap-and-pay handled by Google Play Services, P2P payments stuck in the weaker app, and Wallet reduced to loyalty cards, transit cards and IDs.

Ron Amadeo's verdict on the state of play: 'Google's turbulent payment products have never been worse than right now.'

Employee exodus, cancelled Google bank-account plans, a fourth payments rebrand, and US users left running two payment apps at once

Google swapped a working US payments app for an India-built codebase without carrying its capabilities across.

The regressions were structural — no multi-account, no multi-device, SIM-locked — not cosmetic bugs.

The damage compounded: staff walked out, and the publicly announced bank-accounts plan (Plex) was cancelled.

Rather than restore the old codebase in the US, Google shipped a fourth brand and left two apps fighting each other.

Rewriting a product's codebase is a rebrand with hidden costs: regressions compound into talent loss, cancelled roadmaps, and a rollback three years in the making.

As of the July 18, 2022 report: Wallet had begun rolling out, doubling as an in-place upgrade of the old Google Pay internationally; in the US it coexisted with the Tez-based Google Pay, which retained P2P duties; Google said Wallet would grow into digital driver's licenses and car keys, with Google Play Services quietly doing the actual payments work.