Google Wallet can help you store your IDs, driving license, loyalty cards, concert tickets and more. You can also store your payment cards and use tap to pay to pay anywhere Google Pay is accepted. Google wallet is available in various countries but Google never launched it in India. Google let indian users stick with the Gpay which facilitates UPI payments. Tap to pay is not part of it. Also we can not store things such as IDs and Passes in indian version of Gpay.
This might change and Google may launch Google Wallet in India. With the recent version of Google Wallet and Google Play Services, Google has added some flags and code which indicate that Google is working on something for Indian users regarding wallet.
The first change I noticed recently when going through the Google Play Services apk was addition of two new flags
• EarlyCheckInWalletIndia__force_enable_feature
• EarlyCheckInWalletIndia__enable_feature
Both flags are part of com.google.android.gms.pay package in the Google Play Services. This package contains all the flags for features of Gpay/Wallet. Google does server side flipping of flags to enable/disable features for users. So both these flags doesn't really provide any info about what features enabling these flags is going to bring. But the point here is that Google Wallet is not launched in India so why Google added these flags inside Play Services ?
The answer could be that Google may be working on bringing Google Wallet to India. It can enable tap to pay, store payments and various other features for Indian users which we don't have in the current Gpay for India.
I found similar flags in the analysis Google Wallet APK -
• IndiaEligibility__enabled
• IndiaEligibility__force_enabled
These flags are also disabled by default. But this is again a clear indication of Google working towards something for Indian users.
In both cases, enabling the flags doesn't bring anything noticeable UI or feature because there is nothing much added besides flags. Google has dogfood/testing versions internally, so the code will show up slowly in upcoming versions.
The last piece of code I found is also from Google Play Services. In case you don't know, Google was working on Digilocker integration in the Google Files app which was supposed to bring your digital document inside the app such as driving license, COVID certificates, aadhar card. But Google has ditched the effort of bringing these features and they removed the "Important" tab (where digilocker was supposed to be integrated) from the Google Files app completely. So things are going to change and here is how.
This is the code which I found in the Google Play Services -
• LOCAL_RESOURCE_PASS_TYPE_INDIA_PAN_CARD• LOCAL_RESOURCE_PASS_TYPE_INDIA_DRIVERS_LICENSE• LOCAL_RESOURCE_PASS_TYPE_INDIA_COVID_VACC_CERTIFICATE• LOCAL_RESOURCE_PASS_TYPE_INDIA_AADHAAR_CARD
So the word "PASS" along with PAN, DRIVERS LICENCE, VACC CERTIFICATE & AADHAR CARD, is clear indication of the possibility of Google adding support for these directly through Google Wallet using Digilocker, just like Samsung Pass does it. This code is not old as I have checked older beta versions of Play Services where this code is not present. Here is a string which was added in a previous beta version a few weeks ago but I completely ignored it because it didn't make any sense without flags and the other code -
<string="pay_valuable_log_out_digilocker">Logout from Digilocker</string>
This addition was surprising because there was nothing regarding digilocker before in the Play Services. In the words "pay_valuable", the "pay" to Wallet/Gpay and "valuable" refers to the things like Passes, loyalty cards and transit cards. Since we are talking about digilocker, these "valuable" are driving license, vaccination certificate, PAN card and Aadhar card which can be store in Google Wallet after digilocker integration.
That's all about it. We will know more about it in upcoming app updates or maybe Google can itself annouce something about this.
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