Google Pay can now show SafetyNet status on its load page

Google Pay is the Mountain View's increasingly effective digital-transactions platform with apps on iOS and Android. XDA contributors claim to have found a new feature in the latter that may take effect in an upcoming public update. It is a new informative card in the top of its UI that tells the user if they are unable to make contactless payments using the service.

Google Pay users typically lose this facility if their phone fails SafetyNet, a security feature built into Android that protects authentication-sensitive functions such as NFC payments. The most common explanations for such events are the detection of root access or other advanced modifications in Android devices.

Accordingly, the new Pay app's feature will communicate this to the user on start-up. It is triggered through a new SafetyNet API called Attestment, and may prevent situations in which users only find they can't make payments up until the moment they try to complete one.

This service will also gain another new setting that may also control the ability to conduct transactions using mobile devices: PIN protection. This has been discovered as an in-testing toggle within a new update to Google Pay by the researcher Jane Manchun Wong.

It seems this new feature should require a Google-account number code every time an online purchase is attempted via Pay; however, the XDA has reported that, once discovered and activated, it is not as persistent as it should be quite yet.