Despite the rising popularity of online shopping, some aspects of the experience — like checkout — haven’t exactly advanced with the times. If you’re signing up with a retailer you’ve never shopped with before, chances are you’ll be prompted for billing details, shipping addresses, credit card numbers, and gobs of other information you’ve entered a million times before. But Google wants to streamline things.
Pay with Google, a web service announced in May at Google’s I/O 2017 developer conference, is an evolution of the Mountain View, California-based search giant’s Google Payments framework. It’s a two-pronged solution: On the user side, it’s a unified digital wallet for credit and debit cards, and on the developer side, it’s a hassle-free alternative to built-from-scratch checkout systems.
Starting Monday, October 23, retailers, app developers, and others can implement Google Payments with just a few lines of code. When a shopper reaches the checkout page, they’ll see a Pay with Google button that, when tapped, shows all the payment methods they’ve added to their Google account (i.e., the info they’ve entered when setting up YouTube, the Google Play Store, Chrome, or Android Pay.) Selecting a card from the list sends the payment information to the merchant and completes the transaction.
Google isn’t charging merchants a fee for Pay with Google, but instead, they have to add support manually. About 15 already have, and others plan to integrate it in the near future.
Here’s a full list of Pay with Google-approved services, apps, and retailers:
Pay with Google’s backbone is the more than 40 payment providers who have signed on at launch. The pedigreed list includes PayPal’s Braintree, Stripe, Vantiv, Worldpay, Adyen, and Groupe Paysaf. Other partners including ACI, Assist, Ebanx, First Data, Global Payments, GMO, IMSolutions, and TapPay, have pledged to join in the coming months.
“If you’ve ever paid for something on your phone or tablet, you know just how frustrating checkout can be. Maybe you had to fill in a bunch of forms,” Pali Bhat, Google’s VP of product management, wrote in a blog post. “Maybe your session timed out. Maybe you encountered an error and had to start all over again. Paying with Google makes checkout so fast and easy, you can make the most of every moment — whether you’re grabbing a dinner spot or a parking spot.”
Not long ago, Apple treated independent repair like an act of outright hostility. The Cupertino giant locked down parts with serial-number pairing, while repair tools remained firmly out of reach of anyone outside its authorized repair network. More importantly, the company waged a legal and lobbying battle against right-to-repair legislation.
I've covered enough of these fights over the years to know what a shift looks like. That's why what happened in October 2026 genuinely caught me off guard. The day the iPhone Duo went on sale, what may be the most mechanically complex iPhone to date, Apple pulled off a surprising about-face. It published teardown-style repair manuals for a handful of major components.
Apple's first foldable phone is now on shelves, in short supply, but with an unreal amount of buzz around it. After all, it's the first foldable iPhone, and there's plenty that this phone gets right. But there's also a lot that is either broken or underwhelming. What's peculiar is the dialogue around this phone, and how it has completely overshadowed every other attempt at making a phone with a similar form factor.
I've spent some time with the iPhone Duo, and I've used the Galaxy Z Fold 8 for almost three months now. In my opinion, Samsung deserves more credit. When the Galaxy Z Fold 8 arrived earlier this year, it was celebrated in some circles and ridiculed in others for supposedly copying what Apple would eventually deliver with the iPhone Duo. The dialogue was pretty odd, for multiple reasons. Samsung has been making foldable phones for years, so claiming that it copied a product Apple hadn't even launched was simply absurd.
For years, Samsung’s Galaxy A phones have been some of the easiest recommendations for anyone who wants to go the Android route without paying flagship prices. But that part of the lineup could soon become harder to find at a good price.
According to South Korea’s Electronic Times, Samsung is cutting Galaxy A production by about 20% in the fourth quarter compared to its original plans. Component orders have reportedly dropped by a similar amount, which could mean roughly 10 million fewer phones over the year. Samsung is also said to be considering another production cut of more than 10% next year.