Samsung is graduating from Samsung Wallet to Samsung Pay. On June 30, Samsung will bring Samsung Wallet's two-year run to an end.
After sending out a round of emails to Samsung Wallet customers, which caught SamMobile's attention, the company notified the platform's partners of the impending termination.
"This project was very insightful for us and will help us create better services in the future," said Samsung. "We sincerely appreciate all your support once again."
All of Samsung Wallet's features will stop functioning by the end of June. The Samsung partner portal will be shuttered and the Samsung Wallet application programming interface (API) will be unavailable.
"Unfortunately, the usage rate of Samsung Wallet was not what anyone expected," said Samsung. "One of our company's core values is to guarantee the best user experience. We feel today that we can no longer guarantee this experience."
Samsung may have found a better experience for its users in LoopPay, a payment service and company that the Galaxy maker is believed to have acquired for $250 million. LoopPay is expected to land on Samsung Galaxy S6 devices at some point this summer as the rebranded Samsung Pay, a rival to Apple Pay.
While Apple's relatively successful Apple Pay and Google's Google Wallet rely on near field communications (NFC) terminals to conduct transactions, LoopPay, and eventually Samsung Pay, will have the ability to interact with any old card terminal. LoopPay's technology can enable mobile devices to mimic the swipe of a bank card, giving Samsung Pay a much wider reach than its rivals.
As Apple pushes Apple Pay and Samsung preps Samsung Pay, Google is cooking up a new API for Google Wallet. With that change, which will open the platform up to third parties, Google is gearing up Android Pay.
Google senior vice president Sundar Pichai confirmed the existence of Android Pay while speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona back in March.
"We are doing it in a way in which anybody else can build a payments service on top of Android," Pichai said. "So, in places like China and Africa we hope that people will use Android Pay to build innovative services."
While Google Wallet is spinning out Android Pay, the former won't be replaced by the latter. Google Wallet will live on, supported by Android Pay's framework, according to Pichai.
