Amazon Wallet Beta Shut Down After Six Months

In July 2014 Amazon released a new Wallet app, rather quietly, on Google Play and its own Appstore. Initially it only allowed users to store and use loyalty and gift cards. Those cards could be added to the app by scanning the barcode, text, image or QR code with the camera. It was speculated that perhaps at some point Amazon will let users enter their debit and credit cards as well for mobile payments at merchants but that didn’t happen. Now its the end of the road for Amazon Wallet as the beta has been shut down.

Amazon already has millions of credit and debit cards on file. Its easy to see why many would have assumed that this would be the next frontier for Amazon Wallet. The company could have used its new app to let users make mobile payments at merchants by using cards that they had already added in the app but this feature was never introduced.

Just as quietly as it launched the app the company has pulled its Amazon Wallet app from Google Play Store and Amazon Appstore. It has confirmed that while unspent gift cards will continue to be honored users will have to track remaining balances on their own.

This doesn’t mean that Amazon isn’t going to try its hand at something like this ever again. A spokesman for the company says that Amazon learned a lot with the introduction of Wallet and that the company is going to look for ways to implement these lessons at some point in the future.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Amazon, Apps