Nowadays, there exist two distinct versions of Google Pay. The first is focused on countries where NFC-based payments are commonly adopted, while the other is for the Next Billion Users. That later version of Google Pay, known as Tez, is getting a Flutter rewrite that will serve as the basis for global expansion.
The Google Pay team late on Friday evening stated that it chose the Flutter SDK to “drive its global product development.” “Google Pay (Tez)” — as the app is officially named on the Play Store — which lets users pay bills, top-up phone data plans, get local bank loans, buy train tickets, and send money with rudimentary messaging capabilities.
As one-app-for-everything, Tez is very successful in India and Asia. Google wants to bring that model around the world. CEO Sundar Pichai said as much at this start of this year:
We’ve had a lot of difficulties with our payments product over the past 18 months. We had an extremely successful start in India from which we grasped a lot of features, and we’re bringing that and we’re upgrading our payments products globally. And so I’m excited about that rollout, which is coming up in 2020. I think that will make the experience better.
To enhance development — particularly on the cross-platform front — as the app grows, the Pay team selected Flutter and listed the following reasons:
We could write once in Dart and deploy on both iOS and Android, which led to a uniform best-in-class experience on both Android and iOS;
Just-in-Time compiler with hot reload during development enabled rapid iteration on UI which extremely increased developer efficiency and ahead-of-time compilation provided high performance deployment.
The Flutter version of Google Pay (Tez) — viewed in the cover image above — has entered open beta for those in India and Singapore. Android users can sign-up via the Play Store.
In the future, the team is “looking forward to launching Google Pay on Flutter to everyone across the world on iOS and Android.” At the moment, it’s unknown what UI or functionality users in each country will see. Nevertheless, it’s clear that it will be powered by Flutter.
Google Pay next year will append digital bank accounts in USA, while a shopping-focused upgrade is also rumored. Those two skills could be built on the Flutter version if today’s announcement is any pointer. The non-Tez Pay client is also in the process of rolling out a bottom bar-less redesign.
