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

On my Pixel phone, there are many Google-made apps that are not just essential to the way I live and work, but completely impossible for me to let go of. Calendar has all my important meetings and upcoming events; Chrome has my entire browsing history and research; Gmail is, well, Gmail; Meet is how I video call my parents; Maps is how I can move around my new home, Paris, without getting lost; and Photos is where all my memories and all my life are summed up in perfectly categorized albums and tagged faces and places. There are more, too, but if you asked me about the most essential Google-made app for me today, it would be something else: Google Wallet. And no, not just for payments.

How Google Wallet slowly won over my trust

When I first moved to France in 2021, the bank I chose didn’t support Google Wallet. Everything I’d heard about contactless and mobile payments remained a mystery to me. Plus, it was almost baffling to me that some people would trust just their phone 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 — that’s how little Wallet mattered to me.

A couple of years later, though, I opened a new bank account that supported Wallet, and that’s when things started shifting. I think I was on vacation in Slovenia when I noticed that every business took contactless payments, so I just spent the entire trip using Google Wallet to tap-to-pay. It was eye-opening for a couple of reasons. One, I didn’t have to keep taking my wallet out of my backpack every time I needed to pay for something, which, when traveling and in an unfamiliar environment, felt much safer. And two, Wallet kept a running list of my payments, so I could quickly glance over them and see what I’d paid during a given day. That saved me from opening my local bank’s slow and super secure app just to do some quick mental math.

With time, these two advantages won me over to Google Wallet, even when I came back to France. My physical wallet always stays tucked away in a safe pocket in my backpack, which is always a benefit when living in a big, busy city.

But it was a third benefit that sealed the deal for me. My husband and I have a few separate bank accounts, but we pay for things interchangeably. He has an American Express credit card, I have a Wise card, and he has a Meal card through his work. We share these, but we’re not always together when we need to use them. Except that we can have them in Google Wallet on both of our phones and pay with them. That saves us so much from the logistics of, “Hey, I need the Meal card today,” or, “Don’t forget to take the credit card before you leave!”

Google Wallet simplified ticket management for me

One of Google Wallet’s semi-hidden features is that it can scan and save a bunch of tickets for you, regardless of where you got them or whether or not the seller supports direct importing to Wallet or not.

So whenever I buy concert tickets, event entrances, tours, or any other activity that sends its confirmation as a QR code, I immediately scan it into Wallet under the Add to wallet > Everything else menu. The app does an excellent job of parsing all the details of a ticket, from the date and time to the location, QR code, and even more miscellaneous bits like seat number or row and preferred entrance at big venues. And so far, nearly one year into using this trick, I haven’t run into a single issue with it. The QR codes scan perfectly fine at every venue and place I’ve visited, and the details of the location and seats are accurate.

What makes Google Wallet excellent for ticketing, other than the fact that it centralizes many PDFs and emails into one place and keeps the original scan in case you need it, is a series of extra perks 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 somewhere with an iffy reception. As long as they’re in Wallet, they’re accessible.
2. Tickets show up on my Pixel Watch, too, so I don’t even need to get my phone out of my pocket to get into an event.
3. It makes the most important information easier to parse, so I don’t have to squint and zoom to find the entrance time or exact location.
4. It handles foreign-language tickets, which is excellent when traveling. You don’t need to translate the ticket to see what it says: Wallet knows and extracts the seat number as the seat number, and the row number as the row numbers, for example.

Put all of these together, and it’s clear why Google Wallet has won over as my go-to ticket holder. Now, I just wish I could scan multiple tickets in one go and merge them for events that I’m attending with my husband. I’d also love Wallet to pin an active event’s pass to my notification area, just like it does with other flight and train tickets, for example. That would save me from having to dig into the app to find it.

Google Wallet also holds my loyalty cards, insurance, and transit card

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

It has all of my loyalty cards to different stores and supermarkets in France, so I can always and quickly scan my card when I’m doing a self-checkout and bagging my purchases. It also has my insurance card when I go to my doctor. And it’s where I save all my plane and train tickets, too. Seeing Wallet keep up with my flight’s details is one of the small, seamless joys of modern tech. I love that it keeps me updated on the boarding and take-off times, trip progress, and even the baggage claim area. On my recent trip to Bologna, I didn’t have to go check the board to know my luggage would be delivered to belt number 4, because Wallet had already informed me of that before I even reached the luggage zone.

Then there’s the transit aspect, too. Paris’ metro system has yet to adopt Google Wallet for its cards (it’s coming soon), but I’ve been through a few different cities where I could easily use Wallet to pay for public transport. London was one, and most recently, Bologna and Florence. It’s quite freeing to not have to find the ticket machines (especially when taking the bus or tram, where machines aren’t found on every stop), queue up, figure out a new system to buy or top cards, and then guess if I need to validate them or not. Just tap, pass, done. I love it. And most transit authorities now have a way of tallying up daily routes and offering you a reduced per-day price 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 for me from “nice to have” to an absolute must-have 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 many stop-start experiences with Wallet (remember the Wallet > Pay > Wallet changes?), I hope the service is now at such a stable level that Google considers it essential to its suite and continues giving it the attention and love it deserves.