Google Pay suddenly stops working: Major problem with Chinese phones from Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, OnePlus and others
Have you made a contactless payment with your China-ROM phone today? If not, why not try it out to see if it still works? The author of this article will be trying it out soon as well, because overnight, the latest Play Services version 26.28.33 was installed on my Vivo X200 Ultra running a Chinese ROM. Yesterday, it was still running version 26.26.62.
What exactly happened?
You can read up on why this update might be quite problematic for your daily life in several forum posts on XDA and Reddit. Numerous users with smartphones from China claim that they suddenly can no longer make contactless payments via NFC, even though Google Pay has been working without issues for years. To be clear: This only applies to smartphones that were imported from China or purchased there, models with a China ROM so to speak. Anyone who purchased a global smartphone from China in Europe or other parts of the world outside mainland China does not need to worry about this.
Only China-Roms affected
Developer MarvinFS got to the bottom of the problem in his post on the XDA Forum. On his Vivo X200 Ultra, the following lines keep appearing in the Google Play Services log:
TapAndPay: deviceSupportsTokenization: CN SKU
TapAndPay: Disabling TapAndPay HCE service
This makes it clear what Google is doing here: As soon as a Chinese SKU is detected during contactless payments, Google disables the corresponding service.
Google Play Services 26.28.63 was detecting the Vivo as a Chinese SKU and disabling the TapAndPay HCE service. This explains why the Wallet app and Android Wallet role appeared to be functioning correctly while contactless payments remained unavailable.
Everything looks normal
Since Google Wallet itself doesn’t report any issues, the problem is hard to spot and becomes apparent only when you try to pay at an NFC terminal in a store. However, after the updated Play Services, I can report that a new message appears whenever I open Google Wallet. The popup suggests to set Google Pay as the default for contactless payments, even though this was the case for years already. As you can see in the transaction history, payments via Google Pay were processed correctly up until August 1.
Which phones are affected
Not only Vivo X200 Ultra users are affected by this new Google Pay problem. Currently affected models also include Chinese versions of the Vivo X300 Pro, Vivo X300 Ultra, Vivo X100 Ultra, Vivo X Fold5, Vivo X Fold3 Pro, Vivo X200 Pro (mini), Oppo Find N3, Oppo Find X9 Pro, and Xiaomi 17 Ultra. The problem does not appear to be limited to any specific region; reports of the issue have come in from both Europe and Brazil for example.
Possible workarounds
As I mentioned, before I can’t yet confirm that Google Pay is no longer working on my phone, I’ll provide an update as soon as possible. At the moment, there appear to be two primary workarounds for the issue. The first one is to roll back to earlier versions of Google Play Services, which only works via ADB and completely resets Google Wallet. You’ll then have to re-add and set up all your cards. However, this is only a temporary fix, as it’s nearly impossible to prevent another update from occurring at a later date.
Marvin explains the specific steps to follow in his XDA post. The other solution, suggested on Reddit, is to set other wallets as a default payment option, for example Curve Pay. That way you can bypass Google Wallet entirely. Curve does have it's own share of problems unfortunately, for example, when it detects yet another supposedly unauthorized payment and then remains disabled for weeks because Curve support is slow or unavailable.
No official fix in sight
A permanent fix is currently not in sight. Many users of Chinese smartphones are still on the old 26.26 version of Play Services and probably haven’t even realized that they, too, may be affected by this issue in the near future. There’s currently a heated debate on Reddit over the reasons for this sudden block of China-ROM phones from using Google Wallet. This is likely to also affect Chinese citizens who are vacationing or working abroad and want to use Google Wallet. At this point, it cannot be ruled out that this is a bug, but unfortunately, it currently looks more like a deliberate ban. Google has not yet commented on the issue; we will try to reach someone at Google and keep you updated.
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Image: Clay Banks, Unsplash
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