The Google Pay For India (Tez) app is back on the Apple App Store. This is after the popular digital payments’ app had been unavailable for a considerable part of this week, having been unlisted from the App Store while Google fixed some issues with the app. Google says that the issues with the Google Pay app have been ironed out. This means the Google Pay For India app can resume the battles with rival digital payment platforms including PhonePe, Paytm and Amazon Pay. It is expected that the fixes for the Google Pay app will improve payment success rates, particularly for the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions. New users can now download the Google Pay from the App Store on their Apple iPhone and existing Google Pay users must update the app on their iPhones.

The release notes and the changelog for the new Google Pay For India (Tez) app do not specify much in terms of what exactly has been fixed, and all they say is “We've listened to your feedback and we've made several improvements to the payment experience.” From what we noticed after updating the Google Pay app is that the linked UPI bank account which we were using earlier as well with the Google Pay app will need to be restored. That means having to enter the phone number linked with your bank account for authentication that is part of the UPI account linking process before you can start making payments again. Not much seems to have changed as far as the interface of the app is concerned, though we do hope those rather annoying “better luck next time” scratch cards that you get after eligible payments are completed, have been eliminated for good.

Google Pay For India being missing in action the past day and a bit more, and struggling with payment failures before that, would not have helped at a time when digital payments are seeing extensive traction, due to a variety of factors. There are the online sales, including the Amazon Great Indian Festival Sale and the Flipkart Big Diwali Sale as well as the reliance on digital payments at a time when most users are avoiding stepping out of home as much as possible. According to the data by the National Payments Corporation of India released earlier this month, as many as 180 crore UPI transactions were completed in September valuing to as much as Rs 3.29 lakh crore. This is up from 161 crore transactions in August, the latest chapter in what has been a constant rise in UPI transactions with more online purchases and payments being done due to the coronavirus pandemic. Google Pay relies heavily on UPI payments, particularly for iPhone users, though the Google Pay app for Android does support certain credit cards as well