The Google Pay revamp, launched last month (Nov. 18), has catapulted the app to the top of the charts.
The app quickly became No. 1 for finance on the Google Play App Store, the website Apptopia reported. By Dec. 9, it had skyrocketed to No. 1 overall, and has stayed there since.
Beyond that, on Apple’s App Store, Google Pay hit No. 1 for the finance category by Dec. 16. Only four days later, it had gone to the top of the charts in the overall category. Apptopia reported that those rankings were the highest the app has ever scored before.
The Google Pay revamp, the company said, seeks to expand the payments and commerce system’s reach across a range of platforms, devices and even payment types.
Some are calling it a “super app” because of its variety of uses.
The timing for the revamp is right, considering that the pandemic has pushed digital wallet usage upward. Blackhawk Network said that mobile wallet adoption in the U.S. stood at 38 percent usage among consumers before the pandemic. By the fall, the use of mobile wallet had gone up to 55 percent. Now, 88 percent of shoppers surveyed across eight countries use digital wallets.
“What we're trying to do with the new Google Pay is bring three things together in one app,” Josh Woodward, Google’s director of product management, told PYMNTS. Woodward said that, “The first thing is paying friends and businesses. How do we make that really simple, really secure and really fast? The second thing is helping you explore offers and rewards so you can save money.”
He added that the third goal involves getting “insights on your spending so you can stay on top of your money.”
Helena Mao, vice president of global product strategy for payments at Blackhawk, told PYMNTS in an interview that 61 percent of U.S. consumers now make purchases within retailer apps — a significant jump from the 21 percent who did so pre-pandemic.
