Android Pay Is Real, And Will Give Developers The Reins As An API

Google’s Sundar Pichai essentially used today’s Mobile World Congress
keynote to let the cat out of the bag for a whole host of interesting
Google projects, including Android Pay, a new mobile payments framework
that will look to succeed where Google Wallet failed. This time, they’ll be
mostly leaving the apps themselves to developers, and Android Pay is
intended primarily as a developer tool made available via API, rather than
a centralized app like Apple Pay, for instance.

Android Pay sounds like it’ll offer one half of what Apple Pay is on the
iPhone, providing users with a way to store their payment information
locally, and make it available securely to third-party developer apps via
API. Those apps will then determine when and where you can use the payment
cards, via store (and perhaps payment provider) specific apps that can be
branded however third parties like.

Google’s system will tokenize card numbers, in the same way that Apple Pay
and Samsung Pay do, meaning it generates a one-time payment token for
transmission to the receiving terminal for each transaction, rather than
just offering the user’s static credit card information. This decreases the
risk if the transmission is intercepted, since a one-time token with finite
expiry is of no use once it’s already been consumed.

Like Apple Pay, Google’s Android Pay will use NFC for transmission, and
will also support biometric authentication via hardware like the Samsung
Galaxy S6’s fingerprint scanner. And while Samsung is clearly hoping to
offer its own hardware-specific solution, Google’s offering is looking to
convince businesses to adopt it by giving them a lot of freedom in how it’s
presented and integrated into their brand. Pichai told the MWC crowd today
that it’s not meant to compete with Samsung’s offering, however, and is
intended primarily to offer up more consumer choice.

There’s no timeline on a release as of yet, but expect to hear more about
the particulars of Android Pay when Google hosts its annual I/O developer
conference in May.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/02/android-pay-is-real-and-will-give-developers-the-reins-as-an-api/