The new Google Pay app that came out of beta this week replaces a perfectly fine service for P2P users with a less-functional service that has more fees
Existing P2P users lose functionality they had under the old app while paying more for what remains — instant transfers now carry the 1.5% debit-card fee introduced alongside the January web shutdown.
Google converts a cost-center feature into a monetized one, with the same app surface now steering users toward deals, insights, and the 11-bank Plex accounts.
Second-order effects
Users who only wanted free money-sending face a choice between absorbing fees or migrating to rival P2P services, putting churn pressure on Google at exactly the moment it needs engagement to justify the Plex banking bet.
The 11 partner banks gain a distribution funnel inside an app Google controls end-to-end, but inherit reputational exposure if the degraded experience drives complaints.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, big-platform consumer utilities stop being free hooks and become entry points into fee-bearing financial ecosystems — payments, insights, and banking bundled behind one login, with the simple free tier as the casualty.
Regulatory and consumer scrutiny tends to follow when a dominant platform degrades a free service while adding charges; how regulators treat bundled fintech transitions remains genuinely unsettled.
The trend: Consumer payment apps are consolidating from single-purpose free utilities into all-encompassing, fee-monetized money platforms — with Google Pay's redesign one of the clearest instances.
Google has a problem listening to its users. Result: failures to launch competitive products. Article highlights UX pains & it's safe to say, $GOOG killed another of its products: Google Pay. https://arstechnica.com/... Besides, it has a nice chart on $FB moat in communications. …
@dhh
@dhh on x
“This explains why Google is structurally inclined to give up on almost everything it tries. It's almost impossible for anything else to get even close to matching the riches available from mining people's data, processing their eyeballs like pink slime.” https://world.hey.com/..…
@dhh
@dhh on x
Google in a nutshell. A graveyard of discontinued, rebranded, half decommissioned services. There's no organizational stamina for anything except that which pillages data, and that which uses the pillaged data to sell ads. They're the digital version of the petro curse. https://t…
@harper
@harper on x
Google is such a strange place https://arstechnica.com/...
@carnage4life
Dare Obasanjo on x
Someone on reddit said Google isn't a tech company with products but instead an ads company with hobbies. That's the best way to think about this less functional Google Pay with higher fees. It's being rebooted to be a better business not a better product. https://arstechnica.com…
@dhh
@dhh on x
“In addition to less convenient access and forcing users to remake their accounts, New Google Pay is also enticing users to switch with new fees for transfers to debit cards. Old Google Pay did this for free, but New Google Pay now has a fee of 1.5%” https://arstechnica.com/...
@swiftonsecurity
@swiftonsecurity on x
Google is launching a new chat app. It's killing Google Pay, launching a new app also called Google Pay that doesn't support signing-in with your Google account. Also it has a chat feature. A company of executive clowns appointed by other clowns. https://arstechnica.com/...
@monsterbitar
Jonathan Silverblood on x
I was going to write a long tweet-chain about the madness of built-in SIM cards and why government regulation are turning phone companies into social enforcement agencies operating outside the legal system (guilty-without-trial) Instead, see for yourself: https://arstechnica.com/…
@quinnypig
Corey Quinn on x
Google deprecating something in favor of a different thing that's considerably worse? https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@jackerhack
Kiran Jonnalagadda on x
Truth bombs for India Stack, narrated as a critique of Google Pay's export edition. https://arstechnica.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@joshbloch
Joshua Bloch on x
This. And for the record, Google's decision to ax Play Music did separate my 90-year old mother from the music she listened to all her life. https://arstechnica.com/...