More people are eschewing cash than ever before, instead looking for electronic ways to pay wherever they are. Though debit cards are still popular, it's also become common for many shoppers to rely on their phones for basic commercial applications. One of the better all-in-one payment apps is Google Pay, which leverages a number of different technologies in order to give users a one-stop app for their monetary needs.

Features

Google Pay is a Google's all-in-one payment app. It is designed to allow users to send and receive money, to make payments at participating vendors, to manage their money, and to make use of a rewards program. This is an app that is tailor-made for those who want to go as cashless as possible but who also still want the convenience of being able to split checks on the go. Google seems to continually add new features as well, helping to keep it a step ahead of most of the other cash apps on the marketplace.

Benefits

The biggest benefit of Google Pay has to be the sheer level of control that the app gives you over your own money. Not only can you pay online, but you can pay in-person, transfer money, manage your accounts, and keep up with all of your rewards from one easy-to-use app. This is a great choice for those who are tired of having to deal with multiple payment apps when they're out and about, and it's especially useful for those who want to have plenty of monetary choices without having to worry about carrying cash around with them.

Pros and Cons

The biggest point in Google Pay's favor has to be the ambition of the app. This app really does feel like it wants to be your one-stop spending platform, taking on everything from banking apps to Venmo and even Apple Pay in one small package. The more you use the app, the more you're going to get pulled into the general ecosystem - and if you have friends who use it as well, it will seem silly to use almost anything else. This is one of Google's better attempts at creating a platform that does the same kind of lifting as several other competing apps.

Google does, unfortunately, have a tendency to make a lot of changes to this app. While one would think that this is a good thing, the truth is that updates can often remove functionality or get rid of some of the minor features that you might have found personally useful. Even worse, it seems like updates also tend to slow down transfer speeds and make it harder to make payments when merchants aren't totally up to date themselves. This in turn makes it harder to use the Google Pay app in a convenient way, negating the reason to use the app in the first place.

Conclusion

Google Pay is definitely an app that many use, and it does make sense to use it if your friends are already plugged into that particular ecosystem. With that said, there are definitely apps that do each of the individual things that Google Pay does better, but nothing can do it all in the same place quite as well. While you will have to deal with frustration from time to time when you're using this app to pay, it's ultimately worth using if you're looking to do all of your spending directly from your phone.