I can provide a little bit of insight into the Google Pay shenanigans, though I didn’t work there or interact with anyone there.

The initial Google Wallet launch irked the card networks because they presented their own proxy card rather than a card that clearly advertised the card issuer and the network. (Oh boy do they care a lot about branding…)

I assume they dropped NFC initially because it was done with the first generation tech that was very insecure and simply transmitted card numbers in the clear. Today’s contactless tech is all EMV based, and also needs to depend on a Secure Enclave chip to be blessed by PCI; that might explain why they cut off support for a number of devices. This happened around the time Apple Pay came into the scene.

The rebranding and all that though, well, that’s Google.

Or a customer trying to figure out what the payment app of the week is.

Almost everyone I knew used Google Wallet, which was pretty nice, until they shut down the cards at which time it became utterly useless since you could only use it in the Play store. That's one reason I've never used Android Pay or Google Pay or whatever it is now. Too unreliable.

A lot of us switched to Simple for awhile, but then that went defunct too.

So now we're all back to "Are you on Venmo or Paypal or Square Cash now?" whenever we want to transfer money. And sometimes just paper checks, because ancient as that is, it's still the most reliable (as long as both people have bank accounts). Most of us now have regular credit cards for payment, which are also more reliable than any app.

> And sometimes just paper checks, because ancient as that is, it's still the most reliable (as long as both people have bank accounts).

some XVII century stuff right here... it's wire transfers by bank account and phone number all the way basically everywhere east of the atlantic ocean