It’s been three weeks since the latest update of Samsung Pay, and yet here we are with another update for the Indian market. The service is getting refined with the introduction of some new functionalities, especially regarding brick-and-mortar stores.
The big news here is the integration with UPI. Short for Unified Payment Interface, UPI is an initiative promoted by the Indian government in order to boost the mobile economy and provide citizens with a 21st-century payment service. Developed by National Payments Corporation of India and supervised by the Reserve Bank of India, it is a real-time payment system and today represents the Indian flagship initiative towards the mobile economy, accessible 24/7, 365 days a year.
With the latest version of the app, users will be able to pay merchants via barcode scanning. Merchants will get to opt for barcodes through the Bharat QR Code initiative.
The support for Bharat QR Code comes as a pleasant news and follows the latest one regarding Android, i.e. the compatibility with Android Oreo, announced on October. It’s still unclear although when the beta service of Oreo will get launched in India. At the moment Samsung Experience 9.0 Android Oreo beta program is now rolling out for Galaxy S8, S8+, but unfortunately not in India yet. According to the plans of the South Korean company, users of Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note 8 will get their devices updated to Android Oreo in the first quarter of next year.
This shouldn’t be surprising, as the market penetration of Google’s Android 8.0 Oreo is still very low: only 0.3% devices run the new version of the operating system. Yes, we are up from 0.2% in October, but certainly it’s not reassuring, since the figure doesn’t even come close to ios 11 market share. Released on September 19, ios 11 already runs on 15% Apple mobile devices.
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