Newsletter 
Through a post on its official blog, Google has announced that Android Pay will launch in Australia in the first half of 2016, which must be interesting news for Android enthusiasts Down Under. Not only that, Google apparently has bigger and better plans for its digital wallet, seeing as Mr. Pali Bhatt, Director of Product Management on Android Pay, has now officially stated that, “Australia is just the start. We’ll be adding more countries throughout 2016. This was a big year for Android Pay, and we’re excited about what’s to come”. What it does mean however, is that residents of the United Kingdom will have to wait further for the Mountain View, California-based technology company to introduce this much-anticipated service to the country. Sections of the country’s tech media now expects the launch to happen in the second half of next year at the earliest.
For the uninitiated, Android Pay is the search giant’s latest attempt at creating a perfect digital payment platform after the lukewarm response to Google Wallet. The platform is meant to facilitate in-app and tap-to-pay purchases on mobile devices with contactless payments through NFC, thereby reducing the need for physical payment mechanisms like credit or debit cards. With digital payment platform like Android Pay, users are able to make payments using smartphones, tablets and smartwatches running on Android. The best part about the system is that the platform doesn’t require specific contactless payment terminals and can work with existing terminals after a software update to enable contactless payment.
As mentioned already, Android Pay is believed to be the spiritual successor to Google Wallet, which never quite took off the way Google would have wanted it to. The search giant announced the details regarding Android Pay at its Google I/O developers’ conference, which was held earlier this year at San Francisco, California. The Mountain View, California-based company officially launched the service back in September, alongside its seventh generation Nexus smartphones. A number of device manufacturers, technology companies, software service providers and financial institutions seem to believe that mobile payments is going to be the next big thing, thereby lining up their own mobile payment platforms to rival Android Pay.