LG may be set to launch its own mobile payments platform
According to trademark applications and industry leaks, LG is working on a product called G Pay. The seventh letter of the alphabet is a big part of LG’s branding, as its phones have names like the LG G4.
The company has applied to trademark the G Pay name in South Korea and the U.S., which indicate there should be some type of global launch for the service.
There isn’t any indication whether G Pay would use only NFC technology, like Android Pay (or Apple Pay), or also use the Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) feature of Samsung Pay. This allows Samsung Pay users to make a payment at terminals that don’t accept NFC payments. Of course, our hands on found a lot of clerks were confounded by this dark magic.
We don’t have much to go on in terms of when this could launch. But LG is clearly making the necessary moves to give this fight a go.
Why this matters: If you want a perfect case study of that’s wrong with the Android ecosystem, here it is. We have another large manufacturer reinventing the wheel; not to make any remarkable innovation, but to try and carve off a bigger piece of the pie for itself. Android Pay is plenty good; we don’t need Samsung Pay, and we definitely don’t need LG to come in with its own offering too. In the end such duplication of service confuses customers and just overloads our phones with more junk we don’t need.