Many expect mobile payment will grow to about $90 billion by 2017 from last year’s estimated use of $12.8 billion. Successful players in the mobile payment market include PayPal and Square. In order to capitalize on the trend, Google spent undisclosed amount of money to develop the Wallet and more than $300 million to acquire related digital startups to create Google Wallet more than two years ago. It allows Android users to pay for online as well as in store purchases using many devices including mobile phones. Ten million users have down loaded the app since its introduction. According to some reports Google is working on introducing its own credit card which will help and increase the user base.
Even though Google Wallet helped to promote awareness of digital payments, it appears that it is running into problems. Google wallet works only on Android base mobile phones. It is having difficulties with acceptance by merchants and adopted by customers. Its app only works on Sprint Nextel. Other major mobile phone carriers including AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA blocked Wallet on their networks. Instead of using Google app for Wallet, Wal-Mart and Target are developing their own apps.