Author Archives: Android

Android Pay says “Привет” to Russia

Stepping out for groceries or an afternoon coffee? You’ll no longer need to bring anything more than your phone. Starting today, Android Pay is available in Russia – which means you’ll be able to enjoy a simpler and more secure way to pay across all 11 time zones.

Android Pay lets you check out quickly and easily in some of your favorite stores and apps – gone are the days of fumbling for credit cards and counting cash. Get the Android Pay app from Google Play and add your eligible card to get started. When you’re ready to pay, just hold your phone near the payment terminal and wait for the checkmark to appear. You can also add all your loyalty cards to Android Pay so they’re easily accessible.

Where can I use Android Pay?

Whether you’re fueling your car, grabbing coffee with breakfast, buying groceries, or going to the cinema, you can use Android Pay anywhere that accepts contactless payments –just look for either of these logos when you’re ready to pay.

Android Pay NFC

Thousands of your favorite places already accept Android Pay, including Magnit, Perekrestok, Starbucks, KFC and Rosneft. And with your loyalty cards saved in the Android Pay app, there’s no need to carry them around anymore.

Select Merchants that accept Android Pay

Shopping in apps like Lamoda, OneTwoTrip, or Rambler-Kassa? Breeze through checkout with Android Pay. You’ll no longer have to enter your payment details every time –look for the Android Pay button and you can pay with a single tap. Here some of the apps that accept Android Pay now, with more coming soon!

RU_in app

And if you’re an online merchant, we've teamed up with several processors to make it even easier for you to accept Android Pay in your apps and sites. Visit the Android Pay API developer site to learn more.

Russian Processors

Getting started

To start using Android Pay, download the Android Pay app from Google Play. You’ll need to have Android KitKat 4.4 or higher on your phone. Then, add an eligible Visa or Mastercard credit or debit card from a supported bank, such as AK BARS, Alfa-Bank, B&N Bank, MTS Bank, Otkritie, Promsvyazbank, Raiffeisen Bank, Rocketbank, Russian Standard Bank, Russian Agricultural Bank, Sberbank, Tinkoff Bank, Tochka, VTB24 or Yandex.Money. Don’t see your bank on the list? Don’t worry. We’re always adding new partners, and we’ll let you know as soon as new banks come on board.

Android Pay Russian Featured Banks

If you already have the Raiffeisen Bank, Sberbank, or Tinkoff Bank mobile apps, you can enable Android Pay from those banking apps without having to download Android Pay. Just tap the “Add to Android Pay” button to enable your card in Android Pay without entering your card information.

Because Android Pay doesn’t share your actual credit or debit card number with stores, it’s safer than using a plastic card. If your phone is ever lost or stolen, you can use Find My Device to instantly lock your phone from anywhere, secure it with a new password, or wipe it clean of your personal information.

Ready to use Android Pay in stores? You’ll need to make sure your phone supports NFC. Thousands of phones do – and we’ve created a guide to answer your questions and point you in the right direction.
Russia OEMs

We’re thrilled to name Russia as our 11th country to adopt Android Pay, and we hope it’ll make your everyday purchases faster, easier, and a little more fun. Get the app now to enjoy the benefits of effortless checkout in apps, online, and at all your favorite places.

Source: Android


What’s next for Google payment and loyalty experiences

Thousands of apps and millions of stores accept Android Pay, a simpler and more secure mobile payment experience. Android Pay is now available in 10 markets, with more coming soon, including Brazil, Canada, Russia, Spain and Taiwan. And in addition to our already announced Visa and Mastercard partnerships, we’ll soon enable a streamlined mobile checkout experience for PayPal users.

The newest ways to pay with Google

Yesterday, we announced the Google Payment API, which lets people pay in app or online with any verified credit or debit card saved to their Google Account, via products like Google Play, Chrome and YouTube.

Wish Pay with Google

For users, the option to pay with Google means breezing through checkout without needing to remember and type multiple lines of payment details. You simply choose your preferred card, enter a security code or authenticate with your Android device, and check out.

Developers who adopt this API can enable an easy-to-use checkout experience for their customers. Sign up for early access to the new Google Payment API.

In the upcoming months, we’ll also enable people in the U.S. to send or receive payments via the Google Assistant. On your Google Home or Android device, it’s as simple as saying “Ok Google, send $10 to Jane for pizza.” All you need is a debit card linked to your Google account.

P2P Assistant

Connect with customers before, during and after purchase

We’re also announcing new ways for merchants to engage and reward customers before they walk into the store and after they’ve left.

The Card Linked Offers API drives customer loyalty by providing a new channel to deliver targeted offers, and Panera Bread is one of the first merchants who will roll out this new capability nationally. MyPanera members who save their loyalty card to Android Pay can discover offers and learn about new menu items, surfaced by Android Pay when they are at the store. The offer is redeemed when you use your MyPanera account at checkout.

Card Linked Offers with Panera

We’re also making it easier for Android Pay users to add loyalty programs. For example, Walgreens Balance Rewards® members who manually apply their loyalty account with a phone number and use Android Pay will receive a notification on their phone that easily enables them to link that loyalty card to Android Pay for future visits. This experience is powered by our smart tap technology, which Walgreens has fully deployed across their 8,000+ U.S. stores.

There’s more—we’re collaborating with Clover, a First Data company, to expand our smart tap technology beyond national retailers to businesses of all sizes. With the upcoming integration of smart tap in Clover’s developer APIs, you’ll be able to build Android apps for loyalty, coupon and gift card redemption and new features, such as order ahead and tap for pick up. 

Visit developers.google.com/payments for the latest on all of our Google Payment, Loyalty and Offers APIs.

Source: Android


New ways to pay with Android Pay and PayPal

Android Pay | PayPal

We're thrilled to bring you even more options at checkout, thanks to a new strategic collaboration between Android Pay and PayPal, one of the world's leading online payment platforms.

Android Pay & PayPal

Millions of people already use their PayPal account to make online purchases, receive payments and send money to friends and family. Soon they can start using the same PayPal account to tap and pay with their phones in stores and speed through checkout in Android apps.

People in the U.S. can simply link their PayPal account to use with Android Pay. You can expect to see this new feature in the Android Pay and PayPal apps within the next few weeks.

Source: Android


Android Pay Integrates with Mobile Banking Apps

Android Pay is joining with several banks around the world—including Bank of America, Bank of New Zealand, Discover, mBank and USAA—to make it even easier to use your cards with Android Pay.

Push Provisioning Bank Partners

If you’re a customer of one of these banks, you can easily add cards to Android Pay from your mobile banking app with just the click of a button.

Discover Push Provisioning

After completing setup, you can use your phone to tap and pay at millions of stores and wherever you see the Android Pay button in your favorite apps and on the mobile web. Android Pay will also send you a notification after each successful transaction.

mBank Full Width

Don’t have the Android Pay app downloaded? No problem. Through select mobile banking apps, you can access and enjoy the capabilities of Android Pay. You can manage bank card choices, like selecting your default payment card or deactivating a card on your phone.

This latest collaboration with banks expands Android Pay’s capabilities as an open platform, and moves us closer toward our goal of empowering mobile payments everywhere. We’re continuing to integrate with additional mobile banking apps, so look for updates from your bank about this new feature.

Source: Android


Introducing PAX: the Android Networked Cross-License Agreement

In Latin, the word pax means “peace.” In the world of intellectual property, patent peace often coincides with innovation and healthy competition that benefit consumers. It is with a hope for such benefits that we are announcing our newest patent licensing initiative focusing on patent peace, which we call PAX.  

Under PAX, members grant each other royalty-free patent licenses covering Android and Google Applications on qualified devices. This community-driven clearinghouse, developed together with our Android partners, ensures that innovation and consumer choice—not patent threats—will continue to be key drivers of our Android ecosystem. PAX is free to join and open to anyone.

Already, Android is distributed under open-source licenses that allow anyone to use it for free. This openness has resulted in enormous choice for manufacturers and users. The Android ecosystem has grown to include more than 400 partner manufacturers and 500 carriers who have produced more than 4,000 major devices in the last year alone with an astounding 1.6 billion active users. We believe PAX will further expand the openness of Android for its members, promoting patent peace that will free up time and money for members, who can then dedicate those resources to creating new ideas.

PAX members currently include Google, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Foxconn Technology Group, HMD Global, HTC, Coolpad, BQ, and Allview. The members collectively own more than 230,000 patents worldwide. As more companies join, PAX will bring even more patent peace and value to its members through more freedom to innovate.  

PAX is the latest innovative licensing effort that Google has helped develop in order to provide balanced patent solutions. Other efforts include the LOT Network and the Open Patent Non-assertion Pledge, as well as our participation in such initiatives as the Open Invention Network and IP3 run by Allied Security Trust. Initiatives like these—and PAX—are among the many ways Google contributes to fair and balanced patent systems across an interconnected world.  

We encourage interested companies, large and small, around the world to join us in PAX and enjoy patent peace. To learn more, please visit the PAX website.

Source: Android


How we stop fraudulent apps from holding you ransom

Recently we shared our 2016 Android Security Year in Review, which looks at how we protect Android users and their data. Today, we're taking a closer look at how we shield people from a rare—but particularly disruptive—potentially harmful app (PHA) known as ransomware. We’ve long had protections from ransomware in Android, and we added new ones in Nougat as well.

Ransomware is a type of app that restricts access to your device until a sum of money is paid. Ransomware usually presents itself in one of two forms: apps that restrict access to your device and then demand payment to regain access to the device, or apps that encrypt data on the device’s external storage (such as an SD card) and then demand payment to decrypt your data. To make the scam more convincing, fraudsters sometimes pretend to be from a credible law enforcement agency and accuse you of doing something illegal so you’re more likely to pay.

Although ransomware has begun to target mobile devices, it’s still rare: Since 2015, less than 0.00001 percent of installations from Google Play, and less than .01 percent of installations from sources other  than Google Play, were categorized as ransomware.  (That's less than the odds of getting struck by lightning twice in your lifetime!).

Ransomware_screen.png
Some examples of popular ransomware

And Android users have long been protected from ransomware. Our Google Play policies strictly prohibit apps that contain it, and if we ever detect these scams, we rapidly take action. Verify Apps, our security system that analyzes apps before they are installed and then regularly checks more than 400 million devices and 6 billion apps everyday for PHAs, is another safeguard. And Application Sandboxing, a technology that forces each app to operate independently of others, provides another layer of defense. Sandboxes require apps to mutually consent to sharing data, a protection which limits ransomware’s ability to access sensitive information like a contact list from another app.

Ransomware_sandbox.jpg

Ransomware protections in Android Nougat

With the release of Android 7.0 Nougat, we added to existing defenses against ransomware, and also made some changes to address some of the newer tactics of ransomware scams. Here are a few examples:

  • Safety blinders: Apps can no longer see which other apps are active. That means scammy ones can’t see what other apps are doing—and can’t inform their attacks based on activity.
  • Even stronger locks: If you set a lockscreen PIN prior to installing ransomware, ransomware can’t misuse your device’s permissions to change your PIN and lock you out.
  • Whacking clickjacking: “Clickjacking” tricks people into clicking something, often by obscuring permission dialogs behind other windows. You’re now protected from ransomware attacks that use this tactic to sneakily gain control of a device.

Protecting your data and device from ransomware

Even with all the safeguards we’ve built into Android and Google Play to protect you from ransomware, there are still a few things that you can do to keep your device safe.

  1. Only download apps from a trustworthy source, such as Google Play.
  2. Ensure Verify Apps is enabled.
  3. Install security updates and always ensure your device is updated to the latest version to get the best security protection.
  4. Back up your device.
  5. Be cautious. Take a moment to read reviews and other information about apps before installing, to make sure you download the app you’re looking for.

If you accidentally install ransomware on your phone, you have a few options. First, you can try to boot into safe mode. Starting your device in safe mode means your device only has the original software and apps that came with it. If an app is misbehaving but the issues go away in safe mode, the problem is probably caused by a third-party app downloaded on your device. If you can boot into safe mode, try to uninstall the app and then reboot the device. On a Pixel, you can get into safe mode with a keyboard combination that PHAs can't touch.

If safe mode doesn’t work, then you might have to reset your phone to factory settings. Many devices running Android allow you to remove dangerous apps by resetting it to factory settings (also referred to as formatting the device, or doing a "hard reset"). This should be your last resort, but if you’ve backed up your files, resetting your device should be easy. Check with your carrier or device manufacturer for instructions on how to reset your phone.

Ransomware on Android is exceedingly rare. Still, we’ve implemented lots of new protections in Nougat, and we continue to improve on the defenses that have long been in place. Those protections, along with extra vigilance about how you download your apps, will help keep you and your device secure.

Source: Android