Posted by Petra Cross, Engineer, Google Wallet and Jose Ugia, Google
Developer Relations Engineer
Today more than ever, consumers expect to be able to digitize their physical wallet, from
payments and loyalty to tickets and IDs. At Google I/O we announced Google Wallet, which
allows users to do exactly that. Consumers can securely store and manage their payment and
loyalty cards, board a flight, access a gym and much more, all with just their Android phone.
For Android developers, who manage their own digital passes, Google
Wallet offers a fast and secure entry point, especially when quick access is needed. Google
Wallet will be quickly accessible from the device lock screen on Pixel devices and from the
pulldown shade. Your users will be able to quickly access their passes when they need them -
all in one place.
Integrating with Google Wallet became even easier
and more flexible. We’ve summarized the news of what you can expect as an Android
developer.
New Android
SDK
The existing Android SDK supports saving three types of passes:
offers, loyalty cards, and gift cards. You asked us to add support for other pass types, and
we’ve heard you. Today, we are announcing a new, more extensible API and Android SDK, that in
addition to tickets, boarding passes, and transit tickets, and additional pass types, includes
support for the new generic pass, which lets your users store any pass or card to Google
Wallet. The Android SDK lets you create passes using JSON or JSON Web Token as a payload
without a backend integration.
Using the Android SDK is
straightforward. First, you create a payload with information about the pass. You can either
build it directly in your Android app, or retrieve it from your backend stack. Then, you call
the savePasses or
savePassesJwt method in
the "PayClient" to add
the pass to Google Wallet.
Here is how you define and save a sample generic pass
object:
Once your app calls savePassesJwt, the process guides your users through
the flow of adding a pass to Google Wallet, and allows them to preview the pass before
confirming the save operation.
Developer documentation, samples and
codelabs
You can find
the new Wallet API documentation on developers.google.com/wallet. We customized our developer guides
for each pass type to make all the information easily accessible for your specific needs. You
will also find plenty of code samples demonstrating how to check for availability of the
Google Wallet API on the Android device, how to handle errors, and how to add the “Add to
Google Wallet” button to your app.
Don’t forget to play with our
interactive passes visual demo, which lets you fill in the fields and create
your own custom pass prototype without writing a single line of code. The tool also generates
code samples that you can use to build this pass’ data structures which we call “classes” and
“objects”.
We’re really excited to build a great digital wallet experience with you, and can’t wait to
see how you use the Google Wallet API to enrich your customer experience. Take a look at our
hands-on workshop "Digitize any
wallet object with the Google Wallet API" to see a full integration tutorial on
Android.
Developer documentation, samples and
codelabs.png)
