Posted by Cole Stuart, Google Pay Product Marketing
Digital wallets are rapidly growing in popularity, as adoption from users and acceptance from businesses has expanded significantly over recent years. As we have seen in recent months, this trend towards digital payments over traditional card or cash transactions has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 40% of global ecommerce spending in 2019 came from a digital wallet like Google Pay, Apple Pay, or Alipay according to the FIS Global Payments Report1. This year, over one billion shoppers are expected to make a digital wallet transaction.
We believe this is just the beginning. In the next five years, digital wallet adoption is expected to increase dramatically. Worldpay’s white paper explores how adopting digital wallets can benefit businesses like yours. Some of the key takeaways are highlighted below.
What digital wallets have to offer
Digital wallets, such as Google Pay, have the ability to not only improve your business outcomes, but also provide unique value to everyday consumers. Benefits include:
Digital wallets vs. ordinary card transactions
Real tangible benefits are found when businesses adopt a digital wallet. Findings include:
How to bring Google Pay into your business
Ready to adopt a digital wallet and give your customers a seamless transaction experience in just 4 easy steps? Sign up with the Business Console here and visit our developer's site for more information. You can also find the full whitepaper here, alongside previous case studies that prove how Google Pay has helped drive lasting impact for other businesses.
Liked our whitepaper? Reach out directly to the contacts below.
Google:
Steve Klebe
Head of PSP Partnerships, Google Pay
sklebe@google.com
Worldpay:
Rami Josef
Senior Product Manager, Worldpay
rami.josef@fisglobal.com
[1] - Worldpay by FIS Global Payments Report [2] - Sourced from Worldpay’s Worldwide Payments Gateway (WPG) using data from Q4 2018 through Q1 2020
What do you think?
Do you have any questions? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskGooglePayDev.
Posted by Jennifer Kohl, Program Manager, Developer Community Programs
On October 16-18, thousands of developers from all over the world are coming together for DevFest 2020, the largest virtual weekend of community-led learning on Google technologies.
As people around the world continue to adapt to spending more time at home, developers yearn for community now more than ever. In years past, DevFest was a series of in-person events over a season. For 2020, the community is coming together in a whole new way – virtually – over one weekend to keep developers connected when they may want it the most.
The magic of DevFest comes from the people who organize and speak at the events - developers with various backgrounds and skill levels, all with their own unique perspectives. In different parts of the world, you can find a DevFest session in many local languages. DevFest speakers are made up of various types of technologists, including kid developers , self-taught programmers from rural areas , and CEOs and CTOs of startups. DevFest also features a wide range of speakers from Google, Women Techmakers, Google Developer Experts, and more. Together, these friendly faces, with many different perspectives, create a unique and rich developer conference.
Hosted by Google Developer Groups, this year’s sessions include technical talks and workshops from the community, and a keynote from Google Developers. Through these events, developers will learn how Google technologies help them develop, learn, and build together.
Sessions will cover multiple technologies, such as Android, Google Cloud Platform, Machine Learning with TensorFlow, Web.dev, Firebase, Google Assistant, and Flutter.
For this reason, Google Developers supports the community-led efforts of Google Developer Groups and their annual tentpole event, DevFest. Google provides esteemed speakers from the company and custom technical content produced by developers at Google. The impact of DevFest is really driven by the grassroots, passionate GDG community organizers who volunteer their time. Google Developers is proud to support them.
During DevFest 2019, 138,000+ developers participated across 500+ DevFests in 100 countries. While 2020 is a very different year for events around the world, GDG chapters are galvanizing their communities to come together virtually for this global moment. The excitement for DevFest continues as more people seek new opportunities to meet and collaborate with like-minded, community-oriented developers in our local towns and regions.
Join the conversation on social media with #DevFest.
Sign up for DevFest at goo.gle/devfest.
Still curious? Check out these popular talks from DevFest 2019 events around the world...
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
How to add Flutter to your app
The Flutter journey: production app
Getting started with microcontrollers
Chet Haase and Romaine Guy: quality
Building the ultimate Beatles app
Posted by Lillan Marie Agerup, Product Manager
We are always working to improve security protections of Google accounts. Our security systems automatically detect, alert and help protect our users against a range of security threats. One form of phishing, known as “man-in-the-middle”, is hard to detect when an embedded browser framework (e.g., Chromium Embedded Framework - CEF) or another automation platform is being used for authentication. MITM presents an authentication flow on these platforms and intercepts the communications between a user and Google to gather the user’s credentials (including the second factor in some cases) and sign in. To protect our users from these types of attacks Google Account sign-ins from all embedded frameworks will be blocked starting on January 4, 2021. This block affects CEF-based apps and other non-supported browsers.
To minimize the disruption of service to our partners, we are providing this information to help developers set up OAuth 2.0 flows in supported user-agents. The information in this document outlines the following:
If you're an app developer and use CEF or other clients for authorization on devices, use browser-based OAuth 2.0 flows. Alternatively, you can use a compatible full native browser for sign-in.
For limited-input device applications, such as applications that do not have access to a browser or have limited input capabilities, use limited-input device OAuth 2.0 flows.
Modern browsers with security updates will continue to be supported.
The browser must have JavaScript enabled. For more details, see our previous blog post.
The browser must not proxy or alter the network communication. Your browser must not do any of the following:
The browser must have a reasonably complete implementation of web standards and browser features. You must confirm that your browser does not contain any of the following:
The browser must identify itself clearly in the User-Agent. The browser must not try to impersonate another browser like Chrome or Firefox.
The browser must not provide automation features. This includes scripts that automate keystrokes or clicks, especially to perform automatic sign-ins. We do not allow sign-in from browsers based on frameworks like CEF or Embedded Internet Explorer.
If you're a developer that currently uses CEF for sign-in, be aware that support for this type of authentication ends on January 4, 2021. To verify whether you'll be affected by the change, test your application for compatibility. To test your application, add a specific HTTP header and value to disable the allowlist. The following steps explain how to disable the allowlist:
accounts.google.com
Google-Accounts-Check-OAuth-Login:true
The following example details how to disable the allowlist in CEF.
Note: You can add your custom headers in CefRequestHandler#OnBeforeResourceLoad.
CefRequestHandler#OnBeforeResourceLoad
CefRequest::HeaderMap hdrMap; request->GetHeaderMap(hdrMap); hdrMap.insert(std::make_pair("Google-Accounts-Check-OAuth-Login", "true"));
To test manually in Chrome, use ModHeader to set the header. The header enables the changes for that particular request.
Setting the header using ModHeader
See our previous blog post about protection against man-in-the-middle phishing attacks.
Posted by Kenny Sulaimon, Product Manager, ML Kit; Chengji Yan and Areeba Abid, Software Engineers, ML Kit
Two months ago we introduced the standalone version of the ML Kit SDK, making it even easier to integrate on-device machine learning into mobile apps. Since then we’ve launched the Digital Ink Recognition API, and also introduced the ML Kit early access program. Our first two early access APIs were Pose Detection and Entity Extraction. We’ve received an overwhelming amount of interest in these new APIs and today, we are thrilled to officially add Pose Detection to the ML Kit lineup.
Examples of ML Kit Pose Detection
ML Kit Pose Detection is an on-device, cross platform (Android and iOS), lightweight solution that tracks a subject's physical actions in real time. With this technology, building a one-of-a-kind experience for your users is easier than ever.
The API produces a full body 33 point skeletal match that includes facial landmarks (ears, eyes, mouth, and nose), along with hands and feet tracking. The API was also trained on a variety of complex athletic poses, such as Yoga positions.
Skeleton image detailing all 33 landmark points
Diagram of the ML Kit Pose Detection Pipeline
The power of the ML Kit Pose Detection API is in its ease of use. The API builds on the cutting edge BlazePose pipeline and allows developers to build great experiences on Android and iOS, with little effort. We offer a full body model, support for both video and static image use cases, and have added multiple pre and post processing improvements to help developers get started with only a few lines of code.
The ML Kit Pose Detection API utilizes a two step process for detecting poses. First, the API combines an ultra-fast face detector with a prominent person detection algorithm, in order to detect when a person has entered the scene. The API is capable of detecting a single (highest confidence) person in the scene and requires the face of the user to be present in order to ensure optimal results.
Next, the API applies a full body, 33 landmark point skeleton to the detected person. These points are rendered in 2D space and do not account for depth. The API also contains a streaming mode option for further performance and latency optimization. When enabled, instead of running person detection on every frame, the API only runs this detector when the previous frame no longer detects a pose.
The ML Kit Pose Detection API also features two operating modes, “Fast” and “Accurate”. With the “Fast” mode enabled, you can expect a frame rate of around 30+ FPS on a modern Android device, such as a Pixel 4 and 45+ FPS on a modern iOS device, such as an iPhone X. With the “Accurate” mode enabled, you can expect more stable x,y coordinates on both types of devices, but a slower frame rate overall.
Lastly, we’ve also added a per point “InFrameLikelihood” score to help app developers ensure their users are in the right position and filter out extraneous points. This score is calculated during the landmark detection phase and a low likelihood score suggests that a landmark is outside the image frame.
Examples of a pushup and squat counter using ML Kit Pose Detection
Keeping up with regular physical activity is one of the hardest things to do while at home. We often rely on gym buddies or physical trainers to help us with our workouts, but this has become increasingly difficult. Apps and technology can often help with this, but with existing solutions, many app developers are still struggling to understand and provide feedback on a user’s movement in real time. ML Kit Pose Detection aims to make this problem a whole lot easier.
The most common applications for Pose detection are fitness and yoga trackers. It’s possible to use our API to track pushups, squats and a variety of other physical activities in real time. These complex use cases can be achieved by using the output of the API, either with angle heuristics, tracking the distance between joints, or with your own proprietary classifier model.
To get you jump started with classifying poses, we are sharing additional tips on how to use angle heuristics to classify popular yoga poses. Check it out here.
Learning a new skill is always tough, but learning to dance without the aid of a real time instructor is even tougher. One of our early access partners, Groovetime, has set out to solve this problem.
With the power of ML Kit Pose Detection, Groovetime allows users to learn their favorite dance moves from popular short-form dance videos, while giving users automated real time feedback on their technique. You can join their early access beta here.
Groovetime App using ML Kit Pose Detection
Our Pose Detection API is also helping adidas Training, another one of our early access partners, build a virtual workout experience that will help you stay active no matter where you are. This one-of-a-kind innovation will help analyze and give feedback on the user’s movements, using nothing more than just your phone. Integration into the adidas Training app is still in the early phases of the development cycle, but stay tuned for more updates in the future.
If you would like to start using the Pose Detection API in your mobile app, head over to the developer documentation or check out the sample apps for Android and iOS to see the API in action. For questions or feedback, please reach out to us through one of our community channels.
Eustache Luckens Yadley at a GDG Port-au-Prince meetup
Meet Eustache Luckens Yadley, or “Yadley” for short. As a web developer from Port-au-Prince, Yadley has spent his career building web applications that benefit the local Haitian economy. Whether it’s ecommerce platforms that bring local sellers to market or software tools that help local businesses operate more effectively, Yadley has always been there with a technical hand to lend.
However, Yadley has also spent his career watching Haiti’s unemployment numbers rise to among the highest in the Caribbean. As he describes it,
“Every day, several thousand young people have no job to get by.”
So with code in mind and mouse in hand, Yadley got right to work. His first step was to identify a need in the economy. He soon figured out that Haiti had a shortage of delivery methods for consumers, making home delivery purchases of any kind extremely unreliable. With this observation, Yadley also noticed that there was a surplus of workers willing to deliver the goods, but no infrastructure to align their needs with that of the market’s.
Yadley watching a demo at a GDG Port-au-Prince meetup
In this moment, Yadley did what many good developers would do: build an app. He created the framework for what is now called “Livrezonpam,” an application that allows companies to post where and when they need a particular product delivered and workers to find the corresponding delivery jobs closest to them.
With a brilliant solution, Yadley’s last step was to find the right technical tools to build the concept out and make it a viable platform that users could work with to their benefit.
It was at this crucial step when Yadley found the Port-au-Prince Google Developer Group. With GDG Port-au-Prince, Yadley was able to bring his young app right into the developer community, run different demos of his product to experienced users, and get feedback from a wide array of developers with an intimate knowledge of the Haitian tech scene. The takeaways from working in the community translated directly to his work. Yadley learned how to build with the Google Cloud Platform Essentials, which proved key in managing all the data his app now collects. He also learned how to get the Google Maps Platform API working for his app, creating a streamlined user experience that helped workers and companies in Haiti locate one another with precision and ease.
This wide array of community technical resources, from trainings, to mentors, to helpful friends, allowed Yadley to grow his knowledge of several Google technologies, which in turn allowed him to grow his app for the Haitian community.
Today, Yadley is still an active member of the GDG community, growing his skills and those of the many friends around him. And at the same time, he is still growing Librezonpam on the Google Play App Store to help local businesses reach their customers and bring more jobs directly to the people of Haiti.
Ready to start building with a Google Developer Group near you? Find the closest community to you, here.
Last month, Game Developers Conference (GDC) organizers made the difficult decision to postpone the conference. We understand this decision, as we have to prioritize the health and safety of our community. GDC is one of our most anticipated times of the year to connect with the gaming industry. Though we won’t be bringing the news in-person this year, we’re hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC.
Google for Games Developer Summit
The Developer Summit kicks off on March 23rd at 9:00AM PT with our broadcasted keynote. Immediately following, we’ll be releasing a full lineup of developer sessions with over 10 hours of content to help take your games to the next level.
Here are some types of sessions to expect:
Sign up to stay informed at g.co/gamedevsummit.
Support for the game developer community
We recognize every developer is impacted differently by this situation. We’re coordinating with the GDC Relief Fund to sponsor and assist developers who’ve invested in this moment to further grow their games.
We also understand many developers were looking forward to sharing their content with peers. To help with this, developers can use YouTube to stream events from small to large using tools like Live Streaming and Premieres.
We can’t wait to share what we have in store for gaming. Discover the solutions our teams have been building to support the success of this community for years to come.
Posted by the Google for Games Team
Last Friday, GDC 2020 organizers made the difficult decision to postpone the conference. We understand this decision, as we have to prioritize the health and safety of our community.
Every year, we look forward to the Game Developers Conference and surrounding events because it gives our teams a chance to connect with game developers, partners, and friends in the industry.
Although we won’t be connecting in-person this year, we’re still excited to share the latest announcements from Google with everyone through our digital experience. We'll be sharing plans for our digital experience in the coming days.
Thank you to all who keep this community thriving and check back soon at g.co/gdc2020 for more details.
Research shows the potential impact of FAW on continental wide maize yield lies between 8.3 and 20.6 million tonnes per year (total expected production of 39m tonnes per year); with losses lying between US$2,48m and US$6,19m per year (of a US$11,59m annual expected value). The impact of FAW is far reaching, and is now reported in many countries around the world.
Agriculture is the backbone of Uganda’s economy, employing 70% of the population. It contributes to half of Uganda’s export earnings and a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Fall armyworm posses a great threat on our livelihoods. We are a small group of like minded developers living and working in Uganda. Most of our relatives grow maize so the impact of the worm was very close to home. We really felt like we needed to do something about it. The vast damage and yield losses in maize production, due to FAW, got the attention of global organizations, who are calling for innovators to help. It is the perfect time to apply machine learning. Our goal is to build an intelligent agent to help local farmers fight this pest in order to increase our food security.
Based on a Machine Learning Crash Course, our Google Developer Group (GDG) in Mbale hosted some study jams in May 2018, alongside several other code labs. This is where we first got hands-on experience using TensorFlow, from which the foundations were laid for the Farmers Companion app. Finally, we felt as though an intelligent solution to help farmers had been conceived.
Equipped with this knowledge & belief, the team embarked on collecting training data from nearby fields. This was done using a smartphone to take images, with the help of some GDG Mbale members. With farmers miles from town, and many fields inaccessible by road (not to mention the floods), this was not as simple as we had first hoped. To inhibit us further, our smartphones were (and still are) the only hard drives we had, thus decreasing the number of images & data we can capture in a day.
But we persisted! Once gathered, the images were sorted, one at a time, and categorized. With TensorFlow we re-trained a MobileNet, a technique known as transfer learning. We then used the TensorFlow Converter to generate a TensorFlow Lite FlatButter file which we deployed in an Android app. We started with about 3956 images, but our dataset is growing exponentially. We are actively collecting more and more data to improve our model’s accuracy. The improvements in TensorFlow, with Keras high level APIs, has really made our approach to deep learning easy and enjoyable and we are now experimenting with TensorFlow 2.0.
The app is simple for the user. Once installed, the user focuses the camera through the app, on a maize crop. Then an image frame is picked and, using TensorFlow Lite, the image frame is analysed to look for Fall armyworm damage. Depending on the results from this phase, a suggestion of a possible solution is given.
The app is available for download and it is constantly undergoing updates, as we push for local farmers to adapt and use it. We strive to ensure a world with #ZeroHunger and believe technology can do a lot to help us achieve this.
We have so far been featured on a national TV station in Uganda, participated in the #hackAgainstHunger and ‘The International Symposium on Agricultural Innovations’ for family farmers, organized by the Food Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, where our solution was highlighted.
We have embarked on scaling the solution to coffee disease and cassava diseases and will slowly be moving on to more. We have also introduced virtual reality to help farmers showcase good farming practices and various training.
Our plan is to collect more data and to scale the solution to handle more pests and diseases. We are also shifting to cloud services and Firebase to improve and serve our model better despite the lack of resources. With improved hardware and greater localised understanding, there's huge scope for Machine Learning to make a difference in the fight against hunger.
We’re thrilled to announce we’ve expanded our collaboration with PayPal to make payments easy and seamless no matter how or where your customers like to shop. Now, you’ll be able to accept PayPal with Google Pay on your app or website in all 24 countries where your customers can link their PayPal account to Google Pay.
Here are 5 ways this integration can add value to your business:
Hundreds of millions of users already have their payment methods saved to their Google Account. And as of 2018, customers who use their PayPal account to make a purchase on a Google app or service like Google Play and YouTube can automatically choose that PayPal account when they pay with Google Pay—no new setup required. When you enable PayPal as a payment method on your Google Pay integration, all of these customers will be able to seamlessly check out on your website or app.
Users will be able to choose PayPal—or any other payment method—right from the Google Pay payment sheet.
Once users link their PayPal account, they won’t need to sign in to PayPal when they use it with Google Pay. This means they’ll enjoy fewer steps at checkout, which often leads to higher conversion rates. In addition, your customers will get all the advantages that come with their PayPal account—like Purchase Protection and Return Shipping—along with Google Pay’s fast, simple checkout experience and increased security.
Google Pay lets customers keep all of their payment methods in one place. They’ll easily be able to switch between debit cards, credit cards, their PayPal account, and more just by choosing Google Pay at checkout.
PayPal merchants who enable the acceptance of PayPal through Google Pay can continue to get the PayPal benefits they already enjoy. This includes the ability to receive payments directly to their PayPal Business Account within minutes, no minimum processing requirements, and seller protection on eligible transactions.
If you’ve already implemented Google Pay, enabling PayPal is as easy as adding it to your list of allowed payment methods in the body of your requests:
const payPalPaymentMethod = { type: "PAYPAL", parameters: { purchase_context: { purchase_units: [{ payee: { merchant_id: "<YOUR_PAYPAL_ACCOUNT_ID>" } }] } }, tokenizationSpecification: { type: "DIRECT" } }; paymentRequest.allowedPaymentMethods = [payPalPaymentMethod, cardPaymentMethod];
Once you’ve done that, you’ll receive a token you can send to your servers as soon as your customers confirm their transaction. You’ll use this token to issue a call against PayPal’s payment service—see PayPal’s documentation for more details and best practices.
If you haven’t implemented Google Pay yet, check out our online API introduction video or our step-by-step guided codelabs for Android and Web to learn more about it. If you prefer to explore on your own, read our documentation.
We’re excited to offer developers the best of both worlds with Google Pay and PayPal, all while making payments simpler for customers and businesses around the world. Stay tuned for more updates.
Posted by Stephen McDonald, Google Developers Engineer and Jose Ugia, Google Developers Engineer
At Google I/O 2019, we shared some of the new features we’re adding to Google Pay and discussed how you can use them to add value to your customers—whether you accept payments on your app or website or engage with customers beyond payments through loyalty cards, offers, event tickets, and boarding passes.
Read on for a summary of what we covered during the event. If you want to hear the full story, check out the recordings of our sessions: Building Powerful Checkout Experiences with Google Pay and Engaging Customers Beyond Payments: Tickets, Transit, and Boarding Passes.
Better checkout experiences are more likely to increase your conversions. Here’s a look at some of the ways Google Pay can help you improve your checkout process from start to finish.
In an effort to bring customers more detail and transparency, we’ve made some changes to the Google Pay API. Going forward, the Google Pay payment sheet will display pricing information, so customers can double-check their order before they confirm their purchase. We’re also adding modifiers based on transaction conditions (like shipping options), so customers can see all relevant purchase details quickly, without going back to the merchant site, leading to a faster checkout experience.
Users paying online can see the price of the order dynamically before they initiate the transaction.
Along with these improvements to the payment sheet, we’re offering creative new button and onboarding options to encourage customers to choose Google Pay for faster checkout. To start, we launched the createButton API for web developers. This enables a dynamic purchase button that uses the right styling and colors and is localized to your user’s device or browser settings. We’ve also been experimenting with personalized buttons that display important information before users enter the checkout flow. For instance, we can show customers exactly what card they’ll be paying with or let them know if they need to sign in or set up Google Pay – and this information is displayed right on the button. As the button is hosted and rendered by Google Pay, all of this happens without you having to make any changes.
createButton
createButton API allows to display card information directly on the checkout button
The Google Pay API for Passes lets you connect your business to millions of Android users by linking your loyalty programs, gift cards, offers, boarding passes, and event tickets to their Google Accounts. This year, we’re launching new capabilities and integrations that will help you engage customers at more times and places.
Your passengers can add their boarding pass to Google Pay for a seamless check-in experience. Google Pay sends the passengers a high priority notification with their boarding pass just a few hours before their flight so they can easily access it when needed. They’ll also receive notifications with important dynamic information like gate changes or flight delays. These notifications are high priority and will stay prominent on passengers’ phones until they dismiss it or their flight takes off.
Google’s ecosystem can help create complete user journeys across multiple touchpoints. Earlier this year, we announced the ability to check-in to flights directly from the Google Assistant. Once a flight is ready for check-in, your passenger will receive a notification that takes them directly to the Assistant to complete the process. At the end of this flow, the user is issued a boarding pass that can be accessed from the Assistant or from Google Pay. This is built on top of the Passes API, which means that as an airline, if you already added support for boarding passes, you can just add the check-in with the Assistant integration on top of it.
From left to right: new high priority notifications, integration of Myki card inside of Google Maps, new transit tickets and automatic Gmail import.
We’re excited to announce we’re making transit an open API. This means if you’re a transit provider and currently offer barcode tickets for your transportation services, you can now utilize the Passes API to get your tickets digitized in Google Pay. We’ll also be enhancing this API to support dynamic barcodes. The barcodes on customers’ transit tickets or passes will update every few seconds – even if their device is offline. This allows you to increase security -- since your QR codes are changing all the time, it makes it harder to duplicate the ticket.
Now you can also give customers the opportunity to import your loyalty cards to Google Pay right from Gmail—just by adding some markup to your emails. When customers open the Google Pay app, they’ll be shown any loyalty cards from Gmail they haven’t added to Google Pay. With just a tap, they can add them all automatically so they can access them at any time. This feature is currently only available with loyalty programs, but we’ll be expanding to other types of passes in the future.
We’re working on making Passes available to your users on Google even if they haven’t installed the Google Pay app. We are starting with boarding passes and transit tickets, then plan to extend the same functionality to the other Passes. Stay tuned for more.
To learn more about Google Pay, visit our developer resources:
Google Pay is designed to make transactions simple from contactless payments to online purchases and even peer-to-peer payments. It also allows users to store tickets and passes, manage loyalty cards and keep track of transactions. With Google Pay, users can pay with all credit and debit cards saved to their Google Account, making hundreds of millions of cards enabled for faster checkout in your apps or websites. This includes payments for goods and services on e-commerce merchants, online marketplaces and Android apps.
When you integrate the Google Pay API into your app or site, your customers can then transact using any of those cards in as few as two clicks.
When users use their NFC-enabled mobile device or smart watch to pay in places such as supermarkets, restaurants or shops, the card selected is emulated from the device using a secure number that changes on every transaction. Only the bank or card issuer can decrypt this number to process the transaction. The process of securing your card details is called tokenization. Only cards from supported banks can be tokenized, and this is a necessary step to pay contactless using Google Pay.
Users can pay in-stores using NFC-enabled devices with forms of payment that support tokenization.
In contrast, when users pay in your app or on your site through Google Pay, they can select any card saved to their Google Account, including tokenized cards. This enables users to pay on any device in your sites and apps globally.
Users paying online can use any card saved under their Google account(s).
All forms of payments are stored in the user's Google account and protected by multiple layers of security. This includes payment methods that users have already saved to pay for services like YouTube, Google Play or to speed up checkout forms using Chrome Autofill.
You can integrate Google Pay's online APIs to increase conversions by providing a more convenient, more secure and faster way to pay to your users. Some of the benefits include:
Adding Google Pay to your site or application is just a few lines of code away. There are tutorials on how to integrate Google Pay in your website or Android app and step-by-step guided codelabs for Web and Android. Here is a more visual tutorial:
To get started, use this integration checklist (Android | Web) to make sure you have everything you need to complete the integration. When you’re ready to go live with your integration, request production access and follow the final steps to deploy your app (Android | Web) in a production environment.
The Payment Request API is a Web Payments W3C standard that provides a native browser experience for collecting payment information from the user. You can accept Google Pay via PaymentRequest directly, however this may not be available across browsers.
To enable Google Pay for your users across all major browsers with a single implementation, we recommend using the Google Pay JavaScript library as described above. This enables a native Payment Request experience on Chrome, while giving you the flexibility of supporting Google users on other browsers.
The payments sheet is presented natively when triggered from a browser with support for Payment Handler API (on the right), while it falls back to showing a pop-up on browsers that don’t.
As users’ needs evolve, we continue to add features and forms of payment to the Google Pay API –like the recent addition of PayPal– so you can get access to these new payment methods in your app or site without any additional development work.
Don’t miss Google Pay sessions at Google I/O this year to learn about the latest features we are bringing to Google Pay. Bookmark our sessions and check back for livestream details–we look forward to seeing you this week.
Posted by William Florance, Global Head, Developer Training Programs
Building upon our pledge to provide mobile developer training to 100,000 Africans to develop world class apps, today we are pleased to announce the next round of Google Africa Certification Scholarships aimed at helping developers become certified on Google’s Android, Web, and Cloud technologies.
This year, we are offering 30,000 additional scholarship opportunities and 1,000 grants for the Google Associate Android Developer, Mobile Web Specialist, and Associate Cloud Engineer certifications. The scholarship program will be delivered by our partners, Pluralsight and Andela, through an intensive learning curriculum designed to prepare motivated learners for entry-level and intermediate roles as software developers. Interested students in Africa can learn more about the Google Africa Certifications Scholarships and apply here
According to World Bank, Africa is on track to have the largest working-age population (1.1 billion) by 2034. Today’s announcement marks a transition from inspiring new developers to preparing them for the jobs of tomorrow. Google’s developer certifications are performance-based. They are developed around a job-task analysis which test learners for skills that employers expect developers to have.
As announced during Sundar Pichai - Google CEO’s visit to Nigeria in 2017, our continued initiatives focused on digital skills training, education and economic opportunity, and support for African developers and startups, demonstrate our commitment to help advance a healthy and vibrant ecosystem. By providing support for training and certifications we will help bridge the unemployment gap on the continent through increasing the number of employable software developers.
Although Google’s developer certifications are relatively new, we have already seen evidence that becoming certified can make a meaningful difference to developers and employers. Adaobi Frank - a graduate of the Associate Android Developer certification - got a better job that paid ten times more than her previous salary after completing her certification. Her interview was expedited as her employer was convinced that she was great for the role after she mentioned that she was certified. Now, she's got a job that helps provide for her family - see her video here. Through our efforts this year, we want to help many more developers like Ada and support the growth of startups and technology companies throughout Africa.
Follow this link to learn more about the scholarships and apply.