You’re Going To Need To Enter A PIN Before Paying With Google Wallet On Wear OS
Now, from the early look of things, it seems that Google might be planning to bring in a new and highly inconvenient change to the way that Google Wallet works on your Wear OS smartwatch when trying to make a payment. A few users have reported that the app is now requesting them to enter a PIN code before a tap-to-pay transaction goes through. Before, you’d only need to open the app and tap.
While this doesn’t seem to be deployed very widely, it is likely being rolled out in small batches at the moment. Look, I understand where Google is coming from. When it comes to our personal lives, one of the things that we want to be the most secure is our money. We work very hard for it and making it easier for people to illegitimately gain access to our funds because of convenience is something most people wouldn’t agree to.
However, in the real world, it is still quite annoying when you can’t pay as easily as you used to be able to. Anyway, it remains to be seen whether Google is going to stick with this change, but if they do, it simply means that you’ll need to get used to opening the app, verifying your identity with a PIN code, and then tapping to pay.
Google Has Brought Similar Verification Requirements To Google Wallet On Android
It does kind of make sense that Google would make this change to Google Wallet on Wear OS, especially following the changes that they’ve made to Google Wallet on Android. On your Android phone, Google Wallet will work seamlessly when you try to tap to pay, as long as you’ve unlocked your device within three minutes. If more than three minutes have passed by before you attempt to make a payment, it will fail and you’ll need to unlock the device and try again.
Again, the reason for this is obviously to make things more secure and I don’t think there should be any hate towards Google for trying to keep users safer, but two things can be true and we can all agree that this change makes Google Wallet less convenient. However, the hope is that we’ll all get used to this in due time.
However, I personally believe unlocking my phone with my fingerprint is a quicker option than using one finger to type in a PIN on my tiny smartwatch screen, and this might mean defaulting to your phone for payments instead. We’ll see what the user experience is like once the smartwatch changes to Google Wallet have a wider release.
