Do you pay with your watch? Google Wallet brings a feature it should have had a long time ago

Paying with a smartwatch is convenient, but until now it had one annoying flaw: you couldn’t see watch expenses in the mobile app at all. That’s changing now – Google Wallet is starting to display payments from both your phone and watch together, so you finally have an overview of all your expenses in one place.

Google Wallet combines payments from phone and watch

Until now, a simple but impractical rule applied: the phone app only showed payments made with that same phone. Purchases made by tapping your watch didn’t appear in it, and anyone who wanted to see expenses from both devices together had to look them up on the Wallet website. Now, payments from both your phone and Wear OS watch are merged into a single timeline directly on your mobile device.

As reported by 9to5Google, transactions made with a watch have a note under the date and time indicating that the purchase was made on the watch. Distinguishing the payment source is thus a matter of a single glance. Furthermore, the new feature also applies retroactively – your older expenses, not just new ones, will be included in the shared history.

When will you get the new feature?

It’s appropriate to temper expectations here. Google is rolling out the feature gradually on the server side, so it won’t appear for everyone at once, and some people will still have to wait for it – you don’t need a specific app version for it. It started to become visibly widespread in the first days of July, but Google first showed it back in January this year, when it promised that the overview would also include payments from other devices and online purchases paid with a virtual card.

Do you pay with your watch? Google Wallet brings a feature it should have had a long time ago Adam Kurfürst News Adam Kurfürst News

One limitation remains: the payment history will still only offer the last ten transactions. Anyone who needs to browse older expenses must still go to the Google Wallet website. For watch payments to start appearing, both your phone and Wear OS watch simply need to be signed in under the same Google account.

Do you find the unified payment history in Google Wallet useful?

Sources: Android Authority, 9to5Google