Android Pay is probably going to launch at this week’s Google I/O conference, according to a Computerworld article by Matt Hamblen. And it has the potential to be another awkward development in a growing rivalry with erstwhile strategic partner Samsung.
That’s because of Samsung Pay, another major mobile payment service poised to debut imminently. It seems highly likely that the two mPayment systems will be rivals. And as Hamblen points out, while Samsung has about 24 percent of the global market share in smartphones, the Android OS runs on a number of smaller rivals like Huawei, Lenovo, and LG – and they add up. Android Pay is going to function as an API, so it will be able to function on any number of devices using Google’s mobile operating system, and that could help to make it very widespread in the market.
On the other hand, Samsung Pay is going to use a unique non-NFC technology to enable mPayments, which could help it to be marketed to the many merchants in the US and elsewhere that don’t yet have the hardware to support the NFC payments upon which other platforms rely. The company says its service will debut in Korea and the US this summer, which suggests that Google will indeed want to start pushing its own platform into the market as soon as possible – and might launch it at the I/O conference.
Follow Us