The augmented reality fox is gone from Google Maps. There's a reason for that.
Google's AR-enabled Maps app was first teased at last year's I/O, introducing a fox that helped you find your way when you held up your phone to look at the world. Google Maps' AR walking navigation feature is now available to anyone with a Pixel phone, but the fox is gone. The reason is related to the ways Google is looking to make AR helpful in Search or Lens.
At Google's I/O developer conference, the team behind the AR experience in Maps explained what happened to that fox and laid down guidelines on how to create practical AR. The conversation was fascinating, and illustrated a few key things: Google's ideas on functional AR are changing, and upcoming Google AR experiences might also appear in Maps.
How AR walking navigation in Maps looks now.
Google
The fox was too magical
It turns out that Google made a lot of design prototypes for how Maps AR would work, and many failed. The delightful fox-as-guide that appeared at last year's I/O conference and brought a Hiyao Miyazaki presence to Maps isn't there for now. Google's UX designer for the AR Maps experience, Rachel Inman, explained that people expected the fox to be smarter, to lead them to interesting things. The fox was enchanting but distracting.
The fox may come back someday, but clearly Maps' mission was to become more helpful rather than ultra-immersive. Even seemingly basic ideas ended up being too compelling. An original navigational design for the AR map directions painted a blue line on the ground, tracing the directions as you walk, but apparently "people felt compelled to walk right on the blue line."
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This seems to have led to Google laying down new design principles for AR learned from Maps, which may disappoint lovers of dancing dinosaurs. Information in Maps is designed not to look like it's part of the real world. It's not supposed to blend, meaning it stands out and can be located faster. Google calls it "Grounding and Glanceability."
Similarly, the things that pop up in the new Google Maps AR are pretty... map-like. A principle called "Leverage the Familiar" suggests that, since AR takes up a small part of what you see on a phone when using AR, those effects should involve familiar things.
Google had plans for a sparkling river-like flow of particles that would guide you through the map instead of the big floating arrow that's in the current version. But that failed too. Inman said people hated it and felt like they were following blowing bits of trash.
Focus and safety over whimsy
Google's also trying to keep distractions down in AR mode, limiting the pop-up information from locations. The less-is-more approach is supposed to help people stay focused for utility apps such as Maps.
But, interestingly, Google's Maps AR team doesn't want you staying in AR for long. The recommendation is be fast, and then get back to the real world. This sounds familiar: In fact, the quick-glance approach was at work in Google Glass' notifications, and lives on in Google's Wear OS smartwatches.
Google Maps doesn't want you to walk in AR (for now)
Maps currently does something odd when using the AR mode: If you start walking while using it, it blacks out and puts up a message reminding you to pay attention to the real world. Google's team is concerned about distraction while walking and people's safety. It may seem paradoxical, especially since heads-up AR directions seem like the perfect thing for some pair of futuristic magic smartglasses.
But those smartglasses don't exist yet, and Google Maps AR just uses your phone. Maybe the warning's a smart idea, but offering us the choice to override it would be nice. After all, we're already heads-down in our phones all the time, anyway.
Spatial audio AR, like Bose's audio tech, seems like it could be a solution for navigation without visual distraction, but Google's not pursuing augmented audio yet.
Google's push for more practical AR in apps such as Maps and Lens suggests that this quick-glance focused design might be on the rise. But then again, Maps is still a work in progress. And as it keeps being tested on Pixel phones, Google says some of its design ideas could still change.
This week, Google announced that it would be integrating the Nest brand into its broader line of Home products, essentially making Nest the brand for every smart home gadget it sells. As part of this integration, Google’s Home speaker and smart display products will now carry Nest branding and have Nest features.
But in addition to the rebranding, Google announced that it will be discontinuing the Works with Nest program at the end of August, dismantling a set of controls that allow other device manufacturers and service providers to integrate with the Nest ecosystem of devices. Instead, Google will offer a new Works with Google Assistant program, one that will force companies to support the Google Assistant if they want their customers to be able to integrate with Nest products at all. If you want any other product to play nice with your Nest ones, you’ll need to have a Google account.
But more importantly, it may indicate a future where fewer cross-compatible smart home gadgets exist, period — one where you have to buy your components from Google or its approved partners to have them work together at all.
Google says it is making this move in the name of privacy; that by eliminating the Works with Nest program, third-party devices will have far less access to the data captured by Nest’s various smart thermostats, smoke detectors, cameras, alarms, and future products, and thus fewer potential opportunities for abuse. Variety reports that Google plans to give “a small number of thoroughly vetted partners access to additional data,” but the company hasn’t elaborated on who those partners are or what devices or services they provide at this time.
Privacy, especially in the smart home, has been a hot-button topic of late, and it’s something Nest itself has had to wrangle with recently. With so much personal, identifiable data being captured by the many connected devices that can be installed in a home, locking down access to that data makes sense and is ostensibly a good move for consumers. It takes just one stranger talking to your baby through your connected security camera to make you want to rip every connected device out of your home.
The flip side of these greater privacy restrictions is it will likely be far more difficult to integrate a Nest thermostat into a broader smart home plan once Works with Nest goes away. A smart home is most useful and helpful when you can integrate all kinds of sensors, devices, and services together to perform automations. Imagine a home where venting, lighting, locks, and more are automated based on where people are within the home at any given moment. Those sorts of automations, by necessity, require a lot of data input to know whether you’re home, what you’re doing in your home, and how the home can adapt and react to better suit your needs.
Google says that the Assistant works with more than 3,500 home automation brands and over 30,000 devices right now. But if you’ve ever tried to set up complex automations across a wide range of devices using the Google Assistant app, you’ll know how easy it is to reach the limits of what you can do.
The Works with Nest program has been around since 2014, and many device makers integrated their products with it. That now means thousands of devices and services are in limbo with no guarantee all of them will be ported into the Works with Google Assistant program, either because their developers don’t have the resources to rewrite their integrations or because Google won’t offer the same amount and types of data to third parties anymore.
Today, companies like Lutron, SimpliSafe, and others make use of Nest’s home / away states to control things like lighting, smart blinds, home security systems, and more. Some of these larger companies are hopeful that they’ll be able to bring all of their existing features over when they shift fully to the Google Assistant program later this year, but they can’t give their customers any real guarantee that things won’t change significantly.
Some popular Works with Nest integrations that will break on August 31st, 2019 or earlier:
Amazon Alexa will not be able to adjust the Nest Thermostat or display Nest Cam feeds
Logitech Harmony remotes won’t be able to change Nest alarm and home / away modes
Philips Hue lights will not be able to change color when Nest Protect detects smoke or carbon monoxide, nor will they be able to change state when Nest Cam detects movement
Lutron lights will not turn on when the Nest thermostat or Nest Cam detects people
August Home will not be able to set the Nest Thermostat to home or away when locks are opened or closed
SimpliSafe will not be able to directly set the Nest Thermostat to home or away
Wemo switches will not be able to change state when Nest is set to home or away
A notice emailed to Lutron customers after Google’s announcement said that the ability to automate lighting functions based on the Nest’s home and away status, person alerts from Nest cameras, or smoke or carbon monoxide detection from a Nest Protect will be affected by the change. It will also remove the ability to control the Nest thermostat from within the Lutron smartphone app.
“We look forward to working with Google on their Works with Google Assistant program to determine the best way to take care of our joint customers and maximize the Lutron user experience,” Matt Swatsky, vice president of residential mid-market business for Lutron, tells The Verge.
Similarly, SimpliSafe customers will lose the ability to directly control a Nest thermostat based on SimpliSafe’s alarm status or see their current home temperature from within the SimpliSafe app. “For example, people might have their thermostat turn down every time they set their alarm to “Away” so as not to heat an empty house in the winter,” says SimpliSafe CEO Chad Laurans. Now, they’ll need a workaround using Google Assistant to schedule both the thermostat and the alarm system. “Instead of SimpliSafe interacting with Nest, it’s both SimpliSafe and Nest interacting with Assistant,” he says.
Services like If This Then That (IFTTT), which support a wide variety of smart home gadgets and services, also allow you to link actions together over the web to perform handy, complex automations. But IFTTT is one of the specific pieces of an interoperable smart home that Google says is going away: once Works with Nest is shut down, IFTTT support will end entirely.
The downside of IFTTT, in Google’s eyes, is that its wide-open design and compatibility makes it too cavalier with your data, and it’s impossible for Google to control where the data is shared and support IFTTT at the same time. Google says it is working on enabling many similar functions and automations through the Google Assistant, but it’s likely that there will be outliers or obscure ones that just aren’t available after the shutdown. IFTTT had a whole DIY smart home community behind it, experimenting with ways to link devices, but Google and its small array of approved partners can’t be expected to spend the same amount of time.
IFTTT isn’t the only set of DIY integrations that will be going away. Tinkerers have used Nest’s relatively open APIs to build all sorts of things that weren’t officially supported by device manufacturers. An example of this is Samsung’s SmartThings, where the company never officially supported Nest’s thermostat or other devices on its platform. But the community of home-brew developers built unofficial integrations that allowed SmartThings customers to access data from their Nest thermostats and use it to control other devices that SmartThings does support. It’s safe to say that those types of integrations will no longer work at all once Works with Nest shuts down.
And if Google’s willing to restrict access to its allies — the SimpliSafes and Lutrons of the world — what might it be willing to do to its competition? Amazon’s Alexa assistant currently has two Works with Nest skills that allow it to control Nest thermostats and cameras through voice commands to Echo speakers. As a direct competitor, it’s highly unlikely that Google will offer support for Alexa controls in the new Works with Google Assistant program. “We are still working on ways for our customers to continue to use other systems with their Nest products after account migration and when the Works with Nest service shuts down,” said a Google spokesperson when asked about which partners will have deeper access.
Nest’s smart thermostats are often gateway drugs into the larger smart home ecosystem, but soon they could be gateway drugs for a more closed-off Google ecosystem instead. It doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine a future where you’ll have to buy a Nest security system, Nest cameras, Nest doorbells, and more if you want a Nest thermostat at the center of your home, and you may need to think ahead and weigh that possibility before you buy a Nest product now. “When you entrust the integrity of your actual home to a company, you want to know they won’t pull the plug on you,” says SimpliSafe’s Laurans.
Consumer choice doesn’t benefit from restrictions on interoperability, of course. Even assuming you’re interested in buying exclusively Google Nest-branded gear for your home, Nest’s other products are often lacking and don’t provide as comprehensive a suite of features as competing products, not to mention being more expensive.
Nest doesn’t offer any battery-operated cameras or doorbells, nor does the Nest Secure home security system offer any sort of fire monitoring service, even though Nest itself makes connected smoke detectors. An open, or more widely supported, platform would allow a customer to select a Nest thermostat, a SimpliSafe security system, an Amazon Echo, and a battery-operated Ring Doorbell to match their home’s needs and their own wants best. Ring doesn’t currently integrate with Nest devices; this week’s announcement means it probably never will.
Homes are perhaps the most unique and personalized things in our lives, more so than cars, phones, or even computers. Each home’s and family’s needs, priorities, and schedules are different than another’s, which means there needs to be as much flexibility among the various smart home vendors and device makers so homeowners can customize their systems accordingly. Otherwise, the smart home will never truly be as smart or as helpful as it could be.
Google is right that privacy is a huge concern with smart home gadgets, perhaps more than with any other modern device. But we asked for a privacy fence, and it looks like what we’re getting is a walled garden.
Nike, the biggest sneaker maker in the world, wants to solve a problem it knows far too many people have: Which size shoes will fit?
Many shoppers have gone online and ordered multiple pairs of the same style shoe, in different sizes, planning to send back what doesn't fit. The reasons are simple. Consumers often find they fit into different sizes — maybe a 7.5 women's here, an 8.5 women's there — depending on the brand and style. So, when it comes time to buy a new pair, there's a lot of guessing going on.
It's actually, very likely you don't even know what your true shoe size is. Your feet could also be two entirely different sizes.
"Fit is such a big friction point for our customers," said Michael Martin, the global head of digital products at Nike. "We reached a point of realizing this was not just the biggest problem but biggest transformational opportunity that we have. ... No matter how good the shoe is, if the foot doesn't fit well within the shoe, you're not going to get peak performance from it."
Now, Nike says it has a solution. The company will launch Nike Fit, a service being added in North America this July to its mobile app and in stores. Nike Fit will scan customers' feet and tell them what size shoes they should be wearing.The service will roll out to Europe in August, moving to other international markets soon after.
Nike Fit is all part of Nike's bigger push to sell more products directly to consumers through its own shops, website and mobile app, relying less on wholesale partners than it has in the past. And so Nike is opening new stores like its House of Innovation in New York, and Nike Live in Los Angeles, designed specifically for those markets and selling items visitors can't find anywhere else.
In 2018, Nike said its direct sales were up 12%, thanks to strong e-commerce growth and the opening of new stores. And it said direct-to-consumer revenue ended the year representing roughly 30% of total Nike brand sales, up from 28% in the prior year.
Nike Fit will also help the retailer better manage inventory, cut down on returns and even entice shoppers to buy more shoes, early beta testing of the technology showed.
At its core, Nike Fit will work when a customer opens the Nike app, selects a shoe to buy, and then instead of selecting a numerical size, the shopper will be presented with the option to scan his or her foot straight from a smartphone. A scan can take less than 15 seconds. And then Nike Fit will recommend a size, for that particular shoe in consideration, based on the scan. That information — like the width of the shoppers' foot, down to the millimeter — will be saved for later purchases, too, as Nike says its Air Jordan shoe fits differently than another lifestyle shoe or a running shoe.
In stores, Nike will have a similar experience, but a sales associate will do the scanning for a customer.
It's staggering, data show, how many people are either squeezing into a shoe too small, or have one falling off the foot.
At any given time, three out of five people, or roughly 60% of consumers, are wearing the wrong shoe size, based on industry research, Martin explained. And the biggest reason for shoes being returned — whether they were purchased in store or online — is them being the wrong size, he said, adding that Nike receives more than 500,000 calls each year to its customer-service line related to sizing.
It's been estimated that return deliveries of all products will cost retailers $550 billion by 2020.
And, worse news for consumers, wearing the wrong size shoes can lead to injuries that can sideline them from playing a sport or from going to the gym. Foot injuries can also keep you from going to work. At least 60,000 foot injuries are responsible for keeping people in the U.S. out of the office each year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In 2018, Nike spent an undisclosed amount to acquire Invertex, a computer-vision firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, to make Nike Fit possible. Years before this deal was finalized, Invertex had already begun working on a way to scan feet via a smartphone and make sizing recommendations, using machine learning.
Invertex CEO David Bleicher said numerous companies were approaching him and his colleagues by 2017 for their technology. But Invertex ultimately chose to work Nike, viewing the retailer as an "innovation powerhouse," Bleicher said. Bleicher now heads up a digital studio for Nike in Tel Aviv, where he says Invertex is working to solve "many other challenges" in the footwear industry. "The bigger vision is to [help Nike] create better shoes," he said.
The rollout of Nike Fit isn't the first time Nike has tried to tackle the sizing issue, either.
Back in 2000, the company launched its Air Presto shoe — designed by Tobie Hatfield, the brother of well-known Nike shoe designer Tinker Hatfield — in sizes like "small," "medium" and "large," mimicking how t-shirts are sized, not using numbers. But it was more of a test to see how shoppers reacted to both the stretchy material in the Presto shoes and the T-shirt sizing. And Nike eventually went back to numerical sizing for the Presto about three years ago.
But numerical sizing can still be imprecise — and is incredible outdated.
The shoe sizing system is archaic, dating back to the 1330s. It's somewhat of an urban legend that the reigning King of England in 1334 wanted a pair of shoes custom made for him. And when they didn't fit, he grew angry and decided to make some standard system of measurement, because nothing existed like it at the time. The legend goes he declared three barleycorns, or grains of barley, were equal to an inch. And so 21 barleycorns became equivalent to a size 7 shoe, for example.
Fast forward to 1925, and the brannock device was made. That was an attempt by Charles Brannock to perfect the barleycorn method, adding a width measurement. You know, that (horribly uncomfortable) silver, metal tray that you slide your foot into, moving around little bars, to find your shoe size? That same brannock is still found in Macy's shoe departments, Foot Lockers and DSWs across the country today.
"It was all well-intentioned, and it all had a good purpose," said Bill Tippit, a senior engineering director at Nike, about the brannock. "We still use it today, but it really is the thing that just destroyed fit."
Then, there are a handful of up-start sneaker makers that have been looking for ways to solve this problem, too.
A Brooklyn-based company called Atoms, which is currently only selling its shoes to people through invitations, has designed its sneakers in quarter sizes and will send customers three pairs at once. Then, a shopper can pick the two shoes that fit the left and right foot best, even if they're different quarter sizes.
Outside of shoes, bra-maker ThirdLove has embraced the idea of creating the perfect fit for women. It has a "fit finder" tool on its website for shoppers to answer questions and then receive personalized bra recommendations.
"The brands gaining favor with consumers today are ones who know how to relate," said Raj Nijjer, vice president of marketing at Yotpo. "They dialogue with customers, hear their pain points, and more often than not discover there's no such thing as one-size-fits-all. The brands that win are the ones that embrace their customers' individuality and deliver products with the perfect fit."
Beyond educating its customers on sizing, and hopefully helping more people avoid injuries from wearing the wrong size shoe, this technology could also be a financial boon for Nike, with its dominant position in the sneaker industry.
According to NPD Group sports analyst Matt Powell, Nike is the No. 1 footwear brand in the U.S. in terms of sales, representing roughly one-third of the market, ahead of Adidas, with 11% of the market, and Under Armour. It also remains really hot among teens with money to spend.
"Nike is not in any danger of giving up No. 1 by any means," Powell said. "The consumer today is looking for unique products," which Nike continues to churn out, he said.
That said rival Adidas, while it still holds a smaller share of the U.S. market, has been growing sales in the U.S. at a faster rate. In its latest reported quarter, Adidas said grew its North America sales by more than 11%, compared with a 7% gain in Nike's sales in the region. Adidas is also ramping up for a sneaker collaboration with singer Beyonce, which is expected to generate momentum in the U.S.
In 2018, 64% of Nike brand revenues came from footwear — shoe sales were $22.27 billion out of $34.49 billion in total sales. That doesn't include sales from Converse, which operates as a separate business within Nike, and so Converse sneakers won't be compatible with Nike Fit.
Shoe sales were up 6% last year, excluding currency changes, thanks to strength in running, Nike said. But that was less than the 8% growth in footwear revenues in 2017, as Nike didn't sell as many Jordan shoes in 2018.
When testing Nike Fit in stealth in three markets —Seattle, Pasadena, California, and Dallas— Martinsaid the company noticed conversion rates increased for the people who used Nike Fit to find the right shoe size, meaning those people were more likely to leave the store with a bag in their hands. They were also more likely to come back later and buy another pair of shoes. Nike said returns were down at those stores. And associates spent less time running back and forth to the stock room to gather other sizes.
It can also help Nike stock the right inventory. Martin explained that Nike, like many shoe brands, typically ships shoes in bulk to different geographies based on a standard "curve" that's long predicted for the industry how many people typically wear each shoe size. But he said that curve is not as exact as it could be. And so it's easy for companies to end up with too many size 10 sneakers in one market, when it's really the 9 that more of those people need to be wearing, for example. Data gathered from Nike Fit should help the company make its own curve of sorts.
"We've never had any data coming back to understand just how accurate is that distribution," Martin said.
Lastly, Nike Fit is expected to help Nike grow its membership base, which amounts to more than 150 million people worldwide today. A Nike membership is free to sign up for and offers members early access to new product launches, a birthday reward, the ability to chat with athletes for tips on merchandise or training, and on-the-go workouts from Nike's app. The company says it's on track to increase its membership base to 300 million people, as those shoppers spend 40% more than guest customers, on average.
During its six-month trial run of Nike Fit in three stores, Nike said the service was the strongest lever to boost membership sign-ups that it's found thus far.
"Consumers more than ever want to have relationships with a brand. They don't look at their experience with brands as transactional," said Heidi O'Neill, the president of Nike Direct. "You see a more premium, more personal retail environment. Those [retailers] that are winning are serving personally."
Nike Fit is just the latest step in bringing a bigger vision to reality, according to Martin. He sees a day where shoe sizes don't exist. A customer goes to buy a pair of shoes, a box shows up with those shoes inside, and instead of a number on the outside it's your name — "Sarah" or "Michael."
But that will also require more of the industry to get on board with the idea that the brannock device is seriously outdated, and that consumers deserve better fit.
"We think this is a problem people have been trying to solve for a long time," O'Neill said. "But we feel super confident in our solution. ... We know we are going to have a new level of trust from consumers."
Google is releasing 53 new gender-fluid emoji on Pixel phones in beta this week, and will add them to all Android Q phones later this year. Fast Company reports that the emoji, which have been specifically designed to appear neither male nor female, are Google’s attempt at simplifying the emoji keyboard with more universal characters. It’s a modern interpretation of emoji’s previous default: the little yellow man.
The number of emoji has ballooned to over 3,000 since the original 176 symbols were released back in 1999. Some of these are entirely new characters and symbols, but others are new race and gender combinations for existing emoji. The current approach is more inclusive, but it has its problems. It makes the emoji keyboard more difficult to parse, and even then it’s almost impossible to include every possible combination of skin tone and gender in emoji featuring multiple people.
Another problem is that emoji designs sometime have different genders when the core Unicode standard doesn’t specify one. For example, Google’s design for the person in a sauna is female, but on iOS the character is male. This means the emoji’s gender can change when messages are sent between platforms, creating confusion.
Google’s new approach, which we saw the first signs of last year in Android Pie, is to create emoji designs that could conceivably be either male or female. The approach varies between the different characters. Some have genderless mid-length hair, while the dracula emoji has had its clothes changed to an androginous chain rather than a bow-tie (male) or choker (female). Meanwhile, the genderless merperson has its arms crossed in front of its bare chest to obscure it.
There’s no singular way of getting it right,” admits Google designer Jennifer Daniel to Fast Company. “Gender is complicated. It is an impossible task to communicate gender in a single image. It’s a construct. It lives dynamically on a spectrum. I personally don’t believe there is one visual design solution at all, but I do believe to avoid it is the wrong approach here. We can’t avoid race, gender, any other number of things in culture and class. You have to stare it in the face in order to understand it. That’s what we’re trying to do–to [find] the signifiers that make something feel either male or female, or both male and female.”
For now, the 53 new emoji are exclusively a Google project, meaning that if you send them to a non-Google smartphone they’ll still be assigned a gender. However, Daniel thinks that other companies will eventually adopt a similar approach. In the long-term, Daniel wants all emoji to be more universal. That doesn’t mean the old gendered emoji will disappear (they could still be accessible via a contextual menu) but the gender inclusive emoji could become the new default on the emoji keyboard.
Samsung plans to announce a new release date for its stricken Galaxy Fold smartphone soon, according to The Korea Herald. Co-CEO DJ Koh, who is responsible for Samsung’s mobile business, told the newspaper that the company “has reviewed the defect caused from substances [that entered the device], and we will reach a conclusion today or tomorrow [on the launch].”
That language suggests the company may have found a solution to the problem encountered by our own Dieter Bohn, whose Galaxy Fold review unit developed a bump under the screen after just a day of use. Samsung plans to improve the durability of the hinge’s exposed areas, according to the Herald, and will also reduce the gap between the screen’s bezels and its protective layer. Some reviewers inadvertently managed to cause screen malfunctions by removing that layer, which shipped looking like a regular disposable screen protector.
Koh also said “We will not be too late” in response to a question about whether the Galaxy Fold might ship in the US within the month. Yesterday it emerged that Samsung would cancel any preorders if the phone doesn’t ship by May 31st unless customers notify the company otherwise, but it does sound like the company plans to release the device sooner than might have been expected.
At the very least, Koh’s comments confirm that the Galaxy Fold hasn’t been cancelled altogether. But it goes without saying, of course, that anyone still seriously considering buying this phone should watch what happens with the greatest of skepticism.
Buying an app on your phone is straightforward: You head to the App Store or the Google Play Store, tap on the buy button, and have your credit card automatically charged when the app downloads.
In emerging markets like India, a country where nearly everyone uses Android phones and nearly no one uses a credit card, that’s a problem.
On Wednesday, Google announced that it was making it easier for people in countries like these to buy apps without using credit card with a feature called “pending transactions”.
When a user tries to buy an app from the Google Play Store, they can choose to receive a payment code, which they can take to a participating retail store near them, and pay for their purchase in cold, hard cash — after which their app will automatically download to their device.
“This is a new class of delayed form of payment — like cash, bank transfer, and direct debit,” Aurash Mahbod, Google’s director of engineering for the Play Store, told TechCrunch. All refunds, however, come back to users only in the form of Play Store credit.
Google’s Android operating system powers nearly three quarters of the world’s mobile phones, but the Google Play Store doesn’t generate as much money as Apple’s App Store does. In the third quarter of 2018, for instance, the App Store generated 93% more revenue than the Play Store.
By making it easier for people in countries where most people don’t use credit cards to pay for its apps, that's a gap Google is hoping to close.
A few years ago, Google added carrier billing to the Play Store to make paid apps and in-app payments more accessible, even in emerging markets. Now, the tech giant is making it even easier for users in developing regions and other primarily cash-based societies to get their hands on paid content. It's rolling out a new payment option called "pending transactions," which Play Store Director of Engineering Aurash Mahbod describes as a "new class of delayed form of payment -- like cash, bank transfer and direct debit."
The version that's now live in Japan and Mexico allows users to buy paid apps by paying cash at local convenience stores. Google will follow up with the ability to pay for in-app transactions and will most likely make the option available in other developing nations.
They'd simply have to show the cashier the transaction code when they pay within the allotted time, so their accounts can be credited with the amount. If all goes well, their payments will be processed in as short as 10 minutes, though it could take as long as 48 hours if anything goes awry. Unfortunately, transactions paid through the option can't be refunded -- good thing users can think about their decision while making their way to the store.
Google launched the new payment option, since emerging markets are an area of growth for developers. The hope is to turn free users into paying ones. Cash-based transactions are still preferred in those regions, after all, where few people have access to credit cards and don't always have postpaid plans.
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