Mobile payments are tricky to get right. Lots of companies have tried and failed to break into the market, with different rewards programs, hardware features, physical cards, and everything else.
After years of shaking out who's who, Google and Samsung are pretty much the only Android players left in market in the US, for better or worse. The bad news, though, is that they're both getting absolutely dominated by Apple Pay.
Google Pay market share
We'll just get the numbers out of the way first, at least according to the study done by Pulse Network.
Google Pay makes up 3% of mobile wallet transactions in the US, while Samsung Pay makes up 5%. Apple Pay, on the other hand… makes up 92%.
Apple has long made up a bulk of the profits from smartphone makers in the US, but it's about 50/50 in market share. Apple doesn't have a massive userbase advantage.
But what they apparently do have is an advantage in users that will use their mobile wallet system, and that's by an incredible margin. Even with Google Pay being ubiquitous on the web and Samsung Pay supporting a pretty big variety of phones, it turns out those owners just aren't buying things that way.
There are a couple reasons why this could be. The US has been notoriously slow to adopt NFC payments, so not everywhere supports these kinds of payments anyway. On top of that, Apple does seem to do better in an economically affluent crowd, who are probably more likely to shop at places that support it, or on the web with sites that support it.
But regardless of the reasons, it's gotta hurt for both Google and Samsung to be that far behind. Even if Samsung wasn't cannibalizing Google Pay users, their combined 8% still isn't even 1/10th of what Apple has. Yikes.
Hopefully these numbers look a little better outside of the US.
source: Pulse Network
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I suspect the reality has a lot to do with the bulk of Android handsets being a variety of different budget devices. Some literally can’t make these payments (see many Moto phones), but regardless of the NFC feature being present the people who buy these phones are less likely to have a friend or family member with the same phone who already figured it out and champions it. They might all have an Android but each is a little different and a critical mass of hive knowledge isn’t there. Maybe, IDK.
I am Samsung pay user myself where I can. Over the years I’ve had to educate so many cashiers, bartenders, excetera on how to use it. But the largest issue that I have are the major retailers that either don’t take it at all. Walmart they try to shove their Walmart pay down everybody’s throat and they say it’s more convenient. I can’t use Walmart pay at Home Depot so how is that it’s not convenient. They will not take any of the Wireless pay enabled credit cards either. So basically during the entire covid-19 pandemic there was no actual touchless method of painting at Walmart unless you put all of your credit card information on their website no thank you I’m looking for a store to buy stuff at not to have them dictate how AP including self check-out
Perhaps if Samsung had not removed MST from both their phones and watches, they might have fared better in this “war.” As soon as I got a new pone without MST, I switched to Google Pay and kicked Samsung Pay to the curb.
Android had NFC and Google Wallet several years before Apple added it to the iPhone. But stores didn’t adopt NFC contactless pay until it arrived the iPhone. Apple always gets the recognition and not Google which is not fair and Apple unfairly dominates the market. Google Pay is available for both iOS and Android, whereas Apple Pay is only on iOS and more restrictive. At some stores, I’ve seen the credit card reader displays Apple Pay, Google Pay & Samsung Pay
I do find Samsung’s low numbers interesting since they own the tech that didn’t even need NFC. They own the tech behind MST and that works everywhere a mag stripe works. Maybe they should have licensed that tech to other companies like Google.
It’s not unfair, Apple actually put the investment and effort in, Google just threw some tech at the wall and left it there. Apple is this non-stop machine at onboarding every random bank and credit union in the US and abroad, you have to actually put the legwork in to make it work. Also really early NFC payments kinda sucked, you had to launch a separate app with its own PIN, it wasn’t really very secure without the direct hardware/OS support, and it was faster to just whip out a credit card. Apple Pay was the first time it worked on the lock screen without fiddling with apps and security was done properly with the “security enclave” chip (NFC payment is done over a dedicated hardware bus that doesn’t involve the host OS), and then quickly copied by later versions of Android.
Hum no
Google Pay worked from my lock screen long before Apple pay existed