Amazon Wallet
~ the last words ~
amazon wallet was alive for about six months, and i was not one of the people who noticed at the time. it launched as a beta in july 2014, quietly, on amazon's own app store and on google play. it let you keep your gift cards and loyalty cards on your phone so you would stop digging through a physical wallet for them. that was the whole pitch, and it was a us-shaped pitch about us store cards i did not carry.
the problem showed up the second you compared it to what was arriving that same year. apple pay launched in late 2014 and let you tap your phone to pay at a real register with a real card. amazon's wallet could not do that. it held cards that already stored value, but it would not let you link a credit or debit card and actually buy something with a tap. a wallet you cannot pay with is a card holder, and people already had one of those.
by january 2015 amazon had seen the reviews and the usage numbers and pulled the app from both stores. it kept working in a limited way for a little while, then stopped mattering entirely. from ankara none of this touched me, mobile payments in turkey went their own way and arrived later through banks and local schemes. but the shape of the failure travels fine. amazon, a company that is very good at selling you things, could not make you want to pay for them through its phone app.
~ the record ~
| Born | beta on the Amazon Appstore and Google Play, July 2014 |
|---|---|
| Peak | never really had one, it stayed in beta |
| Killed | pulled from both stores, January 2015 |
| Lifespan | about six months |
| Made by | Amazon |
| Killed by | not doing the one thing a wallet app needs to do |
~ what it was ~
the honest description is that amazon wallet was a test. amazon wanted into mobile payments the way apple and google were getting into them, and this was the cheap way to find out if it could get there through gift cards first. the answer came back fast and it was no.
~ the legacy ~
amazon did not stop trying to sit between you and your money, it just stopped trying to do it with a wallet app. the ambition moved into amazon pay, the checkout button that lets other websites take amazon logins. the app died, the appetite did not. it picked a door that was already open instead of building a new one nobody was walking through.
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