Apps & Services
Google Pay Will No Longer Be Available In the USA
Google decided to rebrand its ‘Google Pay’ application in the US as ‘Google Wallet’ on June 4, 2024.
It’s not a strange thing to hear, since we are already familiar with this kind of rebranding. Recently, Google rebranded the ‘Google Bard’ as “Google Gemini’. And now again, it is planning the same for Google Pay in the US.
Google has announced that in June it will stop the Google Pay application in the US and Google Wallet will take over as the payment app. However, don’t you have to worry since this is just a rebranding and the Google Wallet app has the same user-friendly functionality as Google Pay.
So for the people who prefer Google Pay applications in the US, it’s a recommendation for you all: on June 4, 2024, the Google Pay app will stop working, and you have to switch to the Google Wallet application. However, it’s not a big deal to switch between the apps since the new one has similar and familiar functionality.
For a seamless experience, Google Wallet also offers you the option to continue using tap-to-pay in Google Wallet to make store payments. Since the brand is rebranding, it’s pretty clear that it will deliver some new features to Google Wallet, which include the power to store virtual credit and debit cards, loyalty and membership cards, bus and flight tickets, passes, and more.
Google Pay features three new changes
Google stated that it is offering three new tools that Google Pay users should know about even before the deadline, which are as follows:
- The first change is that users have the power to continue to check their account balance as well as transfer funds to their account after June 4, 2024, using the Google Wallet application.
- The second is that the Google Pay application lists offers and deals so users can take advantage of them. On the other hand, this functionality is unavailable in Google Wallet, so users must find alternatives.
- The third is that users will not have the ability to send, receive, or request payments from other users using the US version of the Google Pay application starting June 4, 2024.
As another option, in the scenario where people prefer a Galaxy smartphone, they can use Samsung Wallet to store credit and debit cards and make mobile payments at stores. The application also permits users to store their membership cards, travel tickets, digital keys, and government-iissued ID cards. Apart from this, the brand also offers the power so that users can store their vaccination certificates, event passes, gift cards, login credentials for applications and websites, and digital assets such as NFTs in the Samsung Wallet.
Apps & Services
ByteDance wants to kick off TikTok in the US market rather than selling it to an American firm
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, would have to shut down TikTok in the US market rather than sell it to an American firm. Following many assertions and statements for years, finally, it appears that ByteDance wants to ditch TikTok from the US market. Menahile, earlier reports significantly suggested that eventually TikTok will get banned in the US and was officially approved by the US House, Senate, and President of the US, Biden.
According to a source shared by Reuters via Android Police, ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok, seems looking up to ditching TikTok in the US completely rather than selling it to an American firm, while after the official approval, ByteDance was given the last 270-day deadline that either the company needs to release TikTok from its ownership forever or completely stop TikTok in the US market.
ByteDance counts a small part of TikTok’s revenue, though:
Meanwhile, the company is currently eyeing over some other legal options, but if all the legal options proved unsuccessful, then it’s quite clear that TikTok would be leaving the US market forever. On the flip side, some sources also reveal that the highly engaging properties of TikTok are due to its core algorithms, while these core algorithms are the most essential section of ByteDance’s technology. Moreover, this ditching of TikTok in the US will not really impact ByteDance’s current operations in the US market, as the company accounts for a small part of revenue through the app.
Sources further added that last year, TikTok gained about 25% of its revenue from the US market, which significantly means that it could be a sudden decrement within the revenue stream. However, ByteDance’s dedicated app, Douyin, which is certainly a Chinese version of TikTok, Also, no American firm is willing to pay billions to acquire TikTok without its core algorithms. Meanwhile, all these factors significantly indicate that if the legal efforts proved to be a failure, TikTok would have to leave the US market for sure.
Over the years, Google has made several improvements to its most crucial application, the Google Play Store, and it constantly provides new utility features and improvements. Now, with the latest development, the company is working on a new capability to handle multiple application downloads.
According to the information, Google is looking to bring a new capability to download multiple applications together. Previously, when you tap on the install button of the applications, it starts downloading them one by one. When one application fully downloads, it starts downloading the second application.
However, it is worth noticing that the phenomenon of multiple downloading is limited to only two applications, meaning if you tap on more than three applications to download, it will start downloading two applications while the third one is still pending.
Additionally, the simultaneous download is limited to the new installs, but it will not apply to the update section. We hope that Google may expand the multiple downloads to update phenomenon and may increase the number of downloads together in the next developments.
As per the information, the new change has already started working on several devices, at least for the Android 14 installed devices with the latest version of the Play Store (40.6.31).
Good Lock plays a key role in providing a platform for all the customizing applications or plugins of the Galaxy devices. For information, it provides several types of plugins like NavStar, QuickStar, LockStar, Camera Assistant, and many more. With these plugins, users can perform several customizations for the smartphone UI, including navigation bars, lock screens, home screens, notifications, and many more. To manage these plugins more conveniently, the company has started rolling out the update for Good Lock.
Good Lock is receiving a new update, version 2.2.04.95. With the latest update, the company has introduced some new changes that will fix the phenomenon of installation and deletion of modules, so users can easily manage them according to their requirements.
Along with this, the changelog also says to bring some fixes for the security-related functionalities, so if you are also having some issues while using any of the functions of Good Lock or want to get some performance enhancements, then you should go for the latest Good Lock update.
If you want to install the latest version of Good Lock, you can check its availability from the Galaxy Store. If it is available, tap on the update button, but if it isn’t available, you can also sideload the application through some external sources.