Signs of Life For Android Pay’s Global Rollout

With rumors swirling about Android Pay’s expansion into more countries, Google has started taking steps towards preparing for those launches. Unfortunately, most of the preparations happen behind closed doors where we can’t see them (negotiating with banks, helping the banks put forth Requests For Proposals to find implementers, navigating each country’s legal framework, etc.), but some are publicly visible.

One such public facing step is the localization of help pages for each country, and Google just added a slew of them. Localization often isn’t strictly required (although some countries like Canada can get very prescriptive about requiring support for all official languages), however companies often won’t launch a product without it. Localized help pages can be a very small thing, but having the spelling that you are used to on them (not to mention them being in your language) can make a huge difference for how comfortable you are using them, and for customer satisfaction.

While Android Pay has already launched in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Australia (and has the appropriate localizations for each of them), both Canada (English and French) and Ireland have been there for a couple months now without any public action being taken on them. That would indicate that talks are in progress for those countries, but are coming along slowly (for Canada in particular, Apple Pay ran into some trouble launching, and Samsung Pay is also seeing some delays compared to when they originally hoped to launch).

The interesting new additions are Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Polish, and Traditional Chinese. This would indicate that Google may be hoping to reach Hong Kong before Samsung pay launches there later this year, and Spain and Brazil are likely also on Google’s agenda for the near future (both of which already have Samsung Pay).

The two countries that stand out the most however are South Korea and Poland.

South Korea is Samsung’s stronghold. Samsung Pay launched there in August 2015, and Samsung holds around half the smartphone market all by themselves. It’ll be interesting to see how Google approaches the South Korean market. Will they focus more on LG (who are supposedly working on their payment solution) and other phone manufacturers? Or will they try to take Samsung head-on?

None of the major smartphone payment solutions have targeted Poland yet, however their high adoption of EMV tap to pay terminals could result in them being a fantastic choice for Android Pay’s expansion. We’ll have to wait and see if any real announcement about Poland comes forth, but it could be a fantastic first step into continental Europe.

Where do you think will see Android Pay first? What countries should Google target that they haven’t yet? Sound off below!

Source: Reddit

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