Square Wallet

» see squareup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Square Wallet lived entirely inside the american payments system, which is a polite way of saying it was never going to reach turkey. Square built card readers and apps for US merchants, and the wallet was the consumer half of that world. In ankara i watched it from the outside, the way you watch a neat idea happening in someone else's country and infrastructure.

It started in may 2011 as Card Case, got renamed Square Wallet in 2012, and did something that still sounds slightly magical. You loaded a card into the app, walked into a cafe that used Square, and paid by giving your name. No phone out, no tap. Your face and your name were the checkout. When it worked, it was the smoothest payment anyone had felt, and it made the plastic card feel old.

The problem was underneath. Square could not make the economics work, and the pay-by-name flow needed more regulars than most shops had. In may 2014 Square pulled the app from both stores and pointed everyone at Square Order, a pickup-ordering app that itself died inside a year. From turkey none of this touched me directly. It mattered anyway, because pay-by-name was a glimpse of a checkout we mostly still do not have.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it felt ~

For the people who had it, Square Wallet is remembered fondly, which is rare for a dead payment app. Walking into your regular coffee place and having it just charge you by name felt like the future arriving early. The friction was gone in a way Apple Pay and its tap still have not quite matched, because tap is a gesture and a name is nothing at all.

~ why it died anyway ~

Feeling like the future is not a business model. Every merchant was a manual sign-up, and Square bled on the margins the whole time it ran. The replacement, Square Order, lasted about ten months before Square gave up on the consumer side and went back to selling tools to small businesses. Pay-by-name went with it, and nothing since has quite brought it back.

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