The world of mobile payments was poised to get a big jump after the announcement of Apple Pay, despite how many Android enthusiasts would likely hate to admit it, because let’s face it, Google Wallet just wasn’t doing it for retailers with its extremely slow adoption rate over the years, and Apple Pay was set to bring the kind of loyal acceptance to mobile payments that Apple related products usually bring to many areas. This seemed to have sparked a mobile payments revolution of sorts with the likes of Samsung on the cusp of releasing their own mobile payment system dubbed “Samsung Pay,” and just recently Google officially unveiled their version of mobile payments to take over the task for Google Wallet called Android Pay which was just announced at Google IO 2015 last week.
A likely question for users of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, both devices being the only two which currently support Samsung Pay, is whether or not the app would be able to play nice with the upcoming Android Pay solution which is supposed to release sometime this Summer. According to Samsung’s top strategy executive Young Sohn, the answer is yes, both Samsung Pay and Android Pay will be able to cohabitate a single device.
It seems like both options would provide generally the same thing, and from a broad perspective that is the case. They both provide a way for users to pay for things using their device instead of pulling out their wallet and grabbing a more traditional means of currency. As Sohn points out though, both services, however alike they may be, also provide a payment option for very different scenarios and different retailers, as Samsung Pay works with the more standard magnetic stripe readers at checkouts, while Android Pay is built on NFC technology. Sohn mentions that while NFC payments may be gaining more traction here in the US, there will be other markets which are slower to adopt the system and this is where Samsung Pay could take over. This gives both apps some usefulness on a single device and each could work better depending on the situation, meaning the retailer at which someone is attempting to pay for goods or services or the regional location in which they’re trying to use the app will have some affect as to which is better suited.