Forget Photos and Maps, this is the Google app I can’t live without anymore

On my Pixel phone, there are a number of apps made by Google that are not only essential to the way I live and work, but are completely impossible for me to quit. The calendar has all my important meetings and upcoming events; Chrome has my entire browsing history and research; Gmail is, well, Gmail; This is how I video call my parents; Maps are the way I get around my new home, Paris, without getting lost; And Photos is where all my memories and all my life are summarized in perfectly categorized albums and tagged faces and places. There are more, but if you asked me today about the most essential app created by Google for me, it would be something else: Google Wallet. And no, not just for payment.

When I went to France for the first time in 2021, the bank I chose didn’t support Google Wallet. Everything I had heard about contactless and mobile payments remained a mystery to me. Plus, it was almost shocking to me that some people would just rely on their phones to pay for stuff. Just carry your card with you, isn’t that better? At the time, I didn’t even care if my phone had NFC or not – the wallet didn’t matter that much to me.

However, a few years later, I opened a new bank account that supported the wallet, and that’s when things started to change. I think I was on vacation in Slovenia when I noticed that every business took contactless payments, so I spent the entire trip using Google Wallet to do tap-to-pay. This was eye-opening for a few reasons. One, I didn’t have to take out my wallet from my bag every time I wanted to pay for something, which, when traveling and in unfamiliar environments, felt much safer. And two, the wallet kept a running list of my payments, so I could quickly glance at them and see how much I’d paid during a given day. This saved me from having to open my local bank’s slow and super secure app to do some quick mental math.

Over time, these two advantages attracted me to Google Wallet, even when I returned to France. My physical wallet is always in a secure pocket of my backpack, which is always beneficial when living in a big, busy city.

But it was the third benefit that sealed the deal for me. My husband and I have a few different bank accounts, but we exchange payments for things. She has an American Express credit card, I have a Wise card, and she has a dining card through her work. We share these, but we are not always together when we need to use them. Except that we can keep them in Google Wallet on both our phones and pay with them. This gives us a “Hey, I need a meal card today” or “Don’t forget to take a credit card before you go!” Prevents such problems to a great extent.

One of the semi-hidden features of Google Wallet is that it can scan and save a bunch of tickets for you, regardless of where you got them from or whether the vendor supports direct import into the wallet.

So whenever I buy concert tickets, event entrance tickets, tours, or any other activity that sends its confirmation in the form of a QR code, I immediately scan it into Wallet. Add to Wallet > Everything Else Menu. The app does an excellent job of parsing all the ticket details, from date and time to location, QR code and even more miscellaneous bits like seat number or row and preferred entrance at larger venues. And so far, after almost a year of using this trick, I haven’t faced a single problem with it. The QR codes at every venue and location I visited scanned perfectly, and the descriptions of locations and seats were accurate.

What makes Google Wallet excellent for ticketing, besides the fact that it centralizes multiple PDFs and emails in one place and keeps the original scans if you need them, is a series of additional features that no other solution has:

1. It works offline, so I don’t have to think about downloading my tickets for offline use before going to an underground club or a place with an iffy reception. As long as they are in the wallet, they are accessible.
2. Tickets also appear on my Pixel Watch, so I don’t have to take my phone out of my pocket to attend an event.
3. This makes it easier to parse the most important information, so I don’t have to squint and zoom to find the entry time or exact location.
4. It handles foreign language stamps, which is excellent when traveling. You don’t need to translate the ticket to see what it says: the wallet knows and extracts the seat number as the seat number, and extracts the row number as the row number, for example.

Put it all together, and it’s clear why Google Wallet wins out as my favorite ticket holder. Now, I just wish I could scan multiple tickets at once and merge them for events I’m attending with my husband. I would also love for Wallet to pin any active event passes to my notifications area, like it does with other flight and train tickets for example. This will save me from having to dig through the app to find it.

Besides payments and ticketing, Google Wallet does so much that it has taken over as the app I open most when I’m out and about.

It holds all my loyalty cards for various stores and supermarkets in France, so I can always and instantly scan my cards when I’m checking out in person and receiving my purchases. It also takes my insurance card with me when I go to my doctor. And this is also where I save all my plane and train tickets. Seeing a wallet with your flight details is one of the small, innocuous joys of modern technology. I love that it keeps me updated about boarding and take-off times, journey progress and even the baggage claim area. On my recent trip to Bologna, I didn’t need to check on board to know that my luggage would be delivered to belt number 4, because Valet informed me of this before I even got to the luggage area.

Then there’s also the transit aspect. The Paris metro system hasn’t adopted Google Wallet for its cards yet (it’s coming soon), but I’ve walked through a few different cities where I could easily use Wallet to pay for public transportation. London was one, and more recently, Bologna and Florence. It’s quite freeing to find ticket machines (especially when taking a bus or tram, where there aren’t machines at every stop), queue up, figure out a new system for purchasing or topping up cards, and then guessing whether I need to verify them or not. Just tap, pass, done. I love it. And most transit authorities now have a way to tally daily routes and offer you a lower price per day if you use them multiple times, which is just as good as buying a day card!

For all these reasons and more, Google Wallet has slowly grown from a “nice to have” for me to an essential and pillar of my Pixel and Android experience. Without it, I would have to figure out another way to centralize all my cards and tickets, and I really don’t want to do that.

So while Google has had several stop-start experiences with Wallet (remember the Wallet > Pay > Wallet change?), I hope the service is now at such a stable level that Google considers it essential to its suite and continues to give it the attention and love it deserves.