Google Pay, formerly Android Pay, passes 100M installs on the Google Play Store
Nowadays, several phone manufacturers have their own payment services. There's Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, the upcoming LG Pay, and of course, Google Pay. After experiencing two rebrands and retaining …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Pay's 100M Play Store installs cap a fast arc: Google announced the consolidation of Android Pay and Google Wallet under one brand in January 2018, then began replacing Android Pay with a globally rolled-out Google Pay featuring personalized store recommendations just two months later. The install count matters because it shows the rebrand retained rather than split the existing base.
The milestone lands in a market where every major handset maker ships its own wallet — Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and an upcoming LG Pay per the article's own framing — making distribution scale the differentiator on Android.
First-order effects
- Google now has a single branded wallet spanning former Android Pay and Wallet users, giving merchants and developers one integration target instead of two.
- The 100M figure gives Google a public scale benchmark against Apple Pay and Samsung Pay at the moment LG is preparing to enter with its own service.
Second-order effects
- Rival phone makers' proprietary wallets face pressure to justify their existence on Android devices where Google Pay comes preinstalled, pushing Samsung Pay and the coming LG Pay toward differentiation beyond tap-to-pay.
- A unified Google Pay brand makes the wallet a natural attachment point for other Google services, raising the stakes for banks and card networks negotiating placement inside it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, phone-native wallets evolve from payment buttons into full money apps — a direction the later [[a:960259|Google Pay redesign into an all-encompassing app with P2P payments, finance insights, and banking services]] confirms — turning whoever controls the default wallet into the transaction layer of the phone.
The trend: Phone-maker payment apps are consolidating from per-brand wallets into platform-level money services, with the default wallet becoming each ecosystem's transaction control point.