If you’re an early-adopter (and a big of a tinkerer) and you’ve enabled Google Wallet for use in Australia, you’ll be disappointed to hear that the only way we have to use Wallet here — via the prepaid Google card option — is to be phased out, and what’s worse, you’ve only got a month left.
Google has advised that it plans to end the Prepaid Card Program, because it has enabled Wallet to work with all major debit and credit cards. By Google’s reasoning, the prepaid card service is now redundant. From September 17th, you will no longer be able to add funds to your existing Google Prepaid Card or add a new Prepaid Card to a new Google Wallet device. Come October 17th, the Google Prepaid Card will automatically be removed from the Google Wallet app
Unfortunately, now that the prepaid card service is ‘redundant’, and we Australians have no other way to use Wallet, the service is now virtually unusable in Australia, whether you can get the actual app to run on your handset or not.
If you are using Google Wallet, with some sort of work around to make it work with the prepaid card service, you’ve got a month left to enjoy the future, before we go back to reality. Welcome to Australia, third world (technologically, at least) country.
