Google: Wallet expanding to 10 more Sprint devices this year
BARCELONA, Spain—With Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Wallet support set to expand to the forthcoming LG Viper later this year, Google said U.S. consumers can expect the tap-and-pay system to roll out across a host of additional devices in the months ahead.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's tap-and-pay push has been building since the May 2011 'make your phone your wallet' launch and the October 2011 expansion of live merchants, both of which left Wallet running on a single-carrier, single-device footprint. At Mobile World Congress this week, Google converted that beachhead into a roadmap: the forthcoming LG Viper plus ten more Sprint devices by year-end.
The story travelled unusually far for a device-count announcement — the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, GigaOM, NFC World and six other outlets picked it up on or about March 1 — because the device list is really a statement about carrier alignment: Sprint is currently the only U.S. operator letting Wallet onto its phones.
First-order effects
- Sprint gains a differentiated lineup of roughly eleven Wallet-ready handsets anchored by the LG Viper, giving it an NFC payments pitch no other U.S. carrier can match right now.
- LG's Viper launch inherits a built-in software differentiator — out-of-the-box tap-and-pay — that competing Android handsets on Verizon and AT&T lack.
Second-order effects
- Verizon and AT&T face pressure to respond with their own NFC wallet commitments (the Isis joint venture among carriers being the obvious counter), turning handset NFC support into a carrier negotiation point rather than a default spec.
- Handset makers selling into multiple carriers now have to weigh dual secure-element/payment stacks per SKU, raising bill-of-materials and certification complexity for devices aimed at Sprint versus everyone else.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, control of the phone's secure element — who owns the credential and who approves which wallet runs — becomes the real battleground between platform owners like Google and carriers, with consumers' choice of payment app decided by distribution deals rather than features.
- A Wallet confined to one carrier cannot reach national scale on its own, so Google's next moves hinge on either broadening carrier cooperation or finding a distribution route around them; which path wins remains unresolved from where we stand.
The trend: Mobile payments are shifting from bank-led NFC pilots to a platform-versus-carrier contest over the phone's secure element, with each carrier-exclusive device rollout redrawing the lines.