
Gmail, Contacts, Assistant and Messages apps no longer support sending money - bkraz
https://support.google.com/pay/answer/9868649?hl=en
======
maurys
Is Google Pay new in the rest of the world? It has been very successful in
India as a UPI-based payment method.

India has gotten aggressively cashless (at least in cities) and Google Pay
definitely rode that wave here.

~~~
mrweasel
Both Google Pay and Apple Pay showed up a little to late in many countries.
Local alternatives already dominated, so neither have really been able to gain
traction.

Seeming someone try to use Apple Pay in Denmark is a bit of a novelty. It
works and is reasonably well supported by payment terminals, but why bother
when you already have MobilePay, which have even wider support and more
features?

I have yet to encounter someone who uses Google Pay.

~~~
emptysongglass
I use Google Pay every single day in Denmark. My wife uses Samsung Pay every
single day in Denmark. It's hard to see what people use when they touch their
silicon and glass rectangles to the terminal, harder still when COVID-19
distances are mandated in all stores here.

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scubbo
Genuinely surprised to hear that any of those apps ever supported payments in
the first place. Not that this excuses sunsetting a feature that people
depended on (It's The Google Way!), but...

~~~
techntoke
How do people depend on sending money with Gmail when you can send it in the
browser or app? What is the problem?

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hbcondo714
I clicked the "Learn how to send money to friends" link and the first step is
to "Open the Google Pay app"

You lost me right there Google. I already have your Gmail app to send money
and now you are taking functionality away from it and making me download
another of your apps.

~~~
mxcrossb
So you find it more convenient to switch to a totally different money sending
service than to just download a separate app?

~~~
esperent
By downloading another app you also get the advantage of not using Google and
not having your data mined for advertising/the service randomly cancelled on a
whim.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Instead, you are simply giving it to another company when Google probably
already has a lot of information. Even if they start out not taking any more
information than they need to (which, being a money app, probably is a decent
amount of information), I don't trust any company to stay this way.

Other companies shut down and sell off to larger places too, so you aren't
exactly off the hook there. Slews of apps have done this. You are simply aware
of some of googles' stoppages, in no small part because you might have used a
couple or because they get publicity for longer.

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oh_sigh
I loved the idea that you could attach money to an email just like you could
attach a file. The Gmail interface was perfect, but unfortunately as usual
Google messed up the implementation.

~~~
techntoke
When you send money using Google Pay you still select an email address or
phone number to send it to, and they get an email if that is what you select
letting you know and you get one saying you sent money.

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ShamelessC
Didn't know you could in the first place.

~~~
xeromal
Next to the attachment button was a little money icon. You could click it and
bundle money with an email. It was pretty nifty.

~~~
mastazi
I guess this was US-only? I'm in Australia and never noticed that button (but
Gmail is not my main email any more so maybe I just missed it)

~~~
esperent
I'm on Ireland and I've never seen it either.

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tcbasche
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but what's wrong with using a bank to send money? Not
in US, so I don't even know if that's another one of those things you can't do
like having to still use cheques

~~~
jedberg
> Not in US, so I don't even know if that's another one of those things you
> can't do like having to still use cheques

Yup. We can't just send money to each other via the bank, unless your bank
happens to participate in the Zelle network, and you want to send less than
$5,000 or so (it depends on the bank and your standing with said bank).

It's another super backwards part of US banking.

~~~
pndy
That sounds ridiculous.

The most annoying part here in Poland is to get charged by your bank by not
making enough transactions or not reaching the _required_ specified amount of
money or making ATM withdraw below the set threshold. If you managed to do so,
you avoided paying monthly fees; that's the only things debit accounts owners
should bother themselves about. We can send money between different banks w/o
issues and operations are booked IIRC twice in a day; these are instant if
it's between same bank accounts, or you can pay an extra if you want money
being delivered instantly and recipient belongs to a different bank. We can
also send money on registered phone number via apps and the recipient can pick
it up via ATM (kind of check that is slowly being adapted around; it replaced
previously shortly running system as it was prone to scams); each bank
participates in local cash-less payments system called Blik. Of course Apple
and Google systems works as well but Blik is more popular anyway.

Most of the time operations are being processed instantly online but there are
rare situations where these are being queued offline up until terminal
(speaking about stores) gets online.

Btw, are you still required to confirm operations via handwritten signature?

~~~
mszcz
Yep, besides the stupid name, the BLIK system is surprisingly nifty and
practical.

~~~
artpi
They are expanding internationally - if you can read Polish:
[https://www.forbes.pl/biznes/blik-w-zjednoczonych-
emiratach-...](https://www.forbes.pl/biznes/blik-w-zjednoczonych-emiratach-
arabskich-psp-sprzedalo-polska-technologie-za-granice/jmdxd6r)

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Ijumfs
Clamping down on international funding of terrorism, and election integrity.

------
psmithsfhn
Damn

Sending money thru gmail was the best way to send money.

------
m3kw9
Calculated monopolistic move.

~~~
jldugger
Wouldn't the monopolist move be to move more features into apps everyone uses?

------
unixhero
I have switched to Outlook.com for my main private business email and
protonmail for emailing friends.

Will back out of Google slowly over the next 5 years. The countdown has
started.

~~~
dilyevsky
Google pulls in more functionality into core services. Hn crowd: monopoly!
Google pulls out rarely used features. Hn crowd: am I supposed use different
app now?!?

Not defending google here - there have been some highly questionable product
decisions over the years, but this is just silly.

Also how is outlook any better? Another public megacorp with even deeper
government ties. As someone who grew up in the 90s i still remember Microsoft
as more successful and meaner oracle.

~~~
D895n9o33436N42
> Also how is outlook any better?

Google: our business is ads, and you’re the product. Put more of your data
into Gmail so that we can show you more ads and do a million other things that
benefit us.

Microsoft: our business is software and services and hardware and a bunch of
other stuff you can pay us money for. E-mail service is the product, and
you’re the customer.

~~~
0d311
Then why are there ads in my Windows 10 OS? Why the aggressive data sponging
behavior?

Microsoft is a lot better than Google, but I still feel like I am their
product when I use their OS.

~~~
tux1968
It's much more insidious at the operating system level. It's easier to change
email providers than your entire operating system. I'm shocked there isn't a
louder outcry over Microsoft's intrusions this way into Windows.

------
WaxProlix
I assume this is related to the other Google post today[1], wherein the
moderators are accused of gaslighting their customers instead of responding
appropriately.

Not sure of the context here, so I'll let better informed voices prevail, I
guess.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23969442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23969442)

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Somewhat OT, but in what world does "This has been a running problem with
Google Drive and there is no workaround for now. What we can do is to send
feedback to the team so all of these can be heard." qualify as "gaslighting"?

This term, at least until recently, meant dismissing abnormal behavior by
making the questioner doubt their own sanity. I have a hard time getting that
even from the least charitable interpretation of the above.

~~~
beervirus
Gaslighting is just a vogue term. Nobody who uses it nowadays knows or cares
what it actually means.

~~~
Bud
Uh, I know what it means. Millions of others do, too.

~~~
beervirus
No way to prove it, but I'd actually be pretty surprised if you're right about
_millions_ of people knowing what it actually means.

~~~
Bud
Stop gaslighting all of us. ;) There are over 250 million adults in the US. So
you think that less than 1% of the US population comprehends what
"gaslighting" is?

I doubt you'd wager much money on that.

~~~
beervirus
The way I see it used in practice is wrong like 100% of the time.

