Google Wallet, the Android app that stores bank cards, boarding passes, tickets and loyalty cards on your phone, now works in Kenya. We set it up on an Android phone on Tuesday, and it let us add passes, offered a list of Kenyan shops whose loyalty and gift cards it can hold, and offered to turn photos of other cards into digital passes. What it would not do is take a Kenyan Visa or Mastercard for tap to pay, where you hold the phone to the shop’s card machine instead of your card. That’s the part most people want from it.
Google hasn’t announced the change, but its own help page now shows it. Kenya wasn’t on Google’s list of countries Wallet works in when we checked on Tuesday, even though the app already worked for us. By Thursday 29th October 2026 it was, listed for two of the page’s three features: the Wallet app and the Wallet website, where you manage the same cards and passes in a browser. The third, tap to pay, isn’t listed for Kenya.
What you can put in it
Tap the plus button and Wallet gives you five ways to add something: a loyalty card, a gift card, a transport pass, a payment card, or “Everything else”. The loyalty card option opens a list headed “Popular nearby” with Carrefour, Naivas, Kenya Airways, Chandarana Foodplus, Quickmart, Game, KFC, Coca-Cola Kenya and Cleanshelf at the top. The gift card list carries most of the same shops and adds Pizza Inn, Mr Price, AutoXpress and, oddly, the Kenya National Library Service. Google’s help page on loyalty and gift cards says that a merchant you can’t find by searching the app isn’t supported, so search for your shop’s programme before counting on it. At the till, you open the card in the app and the cashier scans its barcode, or you read out your membership number if the card has none.
Some passes arrive on their own. Our Wallet already had a Hilton Honors card and an Ethiopian Airlines ShebaMiles card in it, picked up from emails in the Gmail account on the phone, each with a “View email” link to check the details against. Google says passes and receipts from Gmail are added automatically if Gmail’s smart features are switched on, and deleting the email removes the pass.
“Everything else” is for cards that have no Wallet version, such as an event ticket, a gym membership or an insurance card. You take or upload a photo of it, and Google’s AI works out what kind of pass it is and fills in the details. Google first rolled the feature out in the US in August 2024. Before you use it here, the app asks you to agree to Google reading your photos and files, and warns that the feature is experimental and some of its suggestions may be wrong. Passes carrying health insurance or government ID details are saved as private passes, which Google says get more privacy and security protections than other passes. If you decline, Wallet will still make passes from photos that have a barcode on them.
The transport pass section is the least useful of the five for now. Its list of operators opens on American transit agencies, starting with Albany Transit System in Oregon.
Tap to pay is still off
Contactless payment is where Kenya is still waiting. When we went to add a payment card, Wallet showed the Mastercard and Visa cards already saved to our Google account and marked both “Not supported for contactless payments”. Tapping through brought up a screen saying cards from Kenya aren’t supported for contactless yet.
Wallet pays contactless by creating a virtual card number for each card you add to the phone, so your real card number never reaches the shop’s machine. The card network and your bank have to match that virtual number to your account, which is why each bank decides whether its cards work. Google’s list of supported payment methods has no Kenyan bank on it.
Earlier this month we looked at a LinkedIn post by Nancy Kilimo, head of the card centre at Diamond Trust Bank, saying her DTB card had been added to Google Wallet in a pilot that Mastercard set up by hand. The post was later removed, and Google still has not announced tap to pay for Kenya.
The same screen offers one thing in place of contactless. You can add a Kenyan card to your Google account for online purchases, which is the older Google Pay checkout for websites and apps. Kenya is on Google’s list of countries where you can pay online or in apps, and that has worked here for some time. It does nothing at a supermarket till.
Nigeria got tap to pay on 28th October
Nigeria got tap to pay a day after we set up Wallet here, and it shows what switching it on takes. Google launched Google Wallet with tap to pay there on Wednesday 28th October 2026, for Android phones, Wear OS smartwatches and Fitbit devices. Four banks are on Google’s Nigerian list: FirstBank, GTBank, UBA and Zenith Bank.
Nine of the ten card types on that list are Mastercard, and the only Visa is UBA’s prepaid card. That’s because Mastercard brought the service in with Interswitch, a Nigerian payments company, which connected those banks to the system that creates each phone’s virtual card number.
Cards from app-based money firms such as OPay, Moniepoint, Kuda and PalmPay aren’t on the list. Neither is Verve, the Nigerian card scheme Interswitch itself owns. So even after Google switches tap to pay on here, whether your phone pays will depend on who issued your card.
A phone tap also needs a card machine that takes contactless payments, and many Nigerian machines can’t. Contactless is about 0.1% of payments in Nigeria, by one payments company’s estimate.
Nigeria is now one of six African countries on Google’s supported payment methods page, with South Africa, Morocco, Mauritius, Botswana and Seychelles, but not Kenya.
What it means for you
Wallet is now a decent place to keep the loyalty cards many of us carry, from supermarket points cards to an airline miles card, and the photo feature covers cards no shop has bothered to digitise. It does not replace your bank card. To pay by tapping an Android phone, you still need a bank that does it in its own app, such as KCB for its Visa cards or Absa through AbsaPay, and each only works with that bank’s cards.
When Google does switch payments on, two of its own pages will show it first. Kenya’s entry on the Wallet country list will add tap to pay, and Kenyan banks will show up on the supported payment methods page. Until both change, keep the bank card with you.
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