Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Wallet on Wear OS smartwatches lets you save transit passes.
- To use a pass, right now you have to open Wallet, find the pass, and tap.
- Wear OS may soon let you scan your unlocked watch to use passes without needing to open the Wallet app first.
When we’re looking at technological advancements, it’s all too easy to fall into trap where we confuse progress for improvement. After all, there can be a million different ways of tackling a given problem, but just because one users fancier, more modern technology than another doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s also better. Today, however, we’re looking at one potential change that sounds like an unambiguous win, as Wear OS looks to improve your access to transit passes.
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NFC is a perfect example of this kind of tech that’s on its surface very slick, and does address real-world needs, but can sometimes be slower than just doing things the old-fashioned way. Sure, it may let us avoid having to carry around a bunch of separate cards, and gets more and more useful as you add passes and IDs to Wallet, but is it actually saving you any time over just pulling out a card and swiping?
Right now, Wear OS on Android-powered smartwatches supports using Google Wallet to not just make mobile payments, but also to access transit networks through a saved pass. And while that works a treat, the currently workflow has the potential for improvement.
To access transit passes on Wear OS, you first need to pull up the Wallet app, scroll to find the pass you’re looking for, tap on it, and then hold your watch to the reader. But as we look into the new version 25.02.32 beta release of Google Play Services, we notice a couple text strings that suggest a change is on the way:
Code
When your watch is unlocked, you can tap to ride without opening Wallet Ride without opening WalletWe love it when these in-development features are presented so clearly, and this one leaves little question as to what Google’s working towards: a solution for tapping to use transit passes without needing to interact with your watch at all, so long as you unlocked it when you put it on.
Now, that said, we do have some questions about what Google’s possible implementation might look like, and specifically there, how this would work with juggling multiple transit pass options. And of course, this still being a work in progress, we’ve zero idea when (or even if) Google might have it fully operational and ready to deploy through a future update. Still, easier access to transit passes sounds like a feature very much worth implementing, and we look forward to hopefully using this to one day breeze through our commute.
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