The concept of a cashless society is building momentum and quickly. Over the past few years, we’ve seen tap pay on cards and phone-based (Apple, Samsung and G Pay) options emerge. But what happens when tap pay from your phone isn’t working? Ex-writer and regular reader of Ausdroid Jamie sent us a tip regarding some issues with Google Pay he’s experienced. He’s not alone either, there are a number of reports on the G Pay app within the Play Store — with our own editor Scott also experiencing it.
There doesn’t seem to be any consistencies with the issue with a note that the phone, store and card type can differ with the same result: Tap and no pay transfer. Clearly, this is a problem and at the moment, trawling through the responses from Google and searching for on Google source hasn’t yielded an easy, permanent solution.
We have experienced this recently on Samsung devices only — Google Pay worked with some retailers but not others. We have tried adding and removing cards, calling our banks to see if there is anything on their end stopping the transactions from going through, and locking and re-unlocking the phones — all to no avail. We did get some temporary respite after a reboot but after a while it stopped working again.
We have experienced it failing at Woolworths and Bunnings but on the same day it worked at Big W and K-mart. Some users have tried changing the battery optimisation setting for Google Pay so it stays in memory but had limited and very inconsistent results. Some users though have given up and are reverting to a different solution — using Samsung Pay seems to be a common solution (the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is a deliberate ploy to get more users onto their payment system).
Jamie did say however that a factory reset on his phone was a successful way of restoring that functionality. It’s not a quick — at least to get your phone back to how you want it — fix, but if you’re the type of person who takes their phone everywhere without carrying your card then you may need to reconsider this if your Google Pay ceases to function.
