One of the major gripes people have with the Android market is its insistence on using Google Checkout for paid transactions. Who wants yet another receptacle for your credit card information when there are already perfectly capable solutions out there that would suffice?
According to TechCrunch, Google feels your pain. They announced yesterday that PayPal, most people’s first choice for online money transfers, would be officially supported for transactions on the Android Market. The announcement didn’t come from Google, however. It came from a blog post on Paypal by developer network director Naveed Anwar. The post cited Google as announcing this from PayPal’s X Innovate 2010 tech conference, which starts today. The post was probably put up a little too early and the announcement is still likely to come to fruition at the conference today.
A deal between Google and PayPal (owned by Ebay) has been in the works for quite some time now, Bloomberg reported back in August that the two companies were in talks, and most analysts agree that partnering with PayPal would be a huge step forward for Google. If they plan to compete with the likes of iTunes, Google better make sure that its payment system is smooth as silk. Another driver for a deal is the possibility of Google rolling out a music store. Once again, if you’re going to compete with Apple on this one, you better have a solid transaction system to back it up. PayPal already has a history working with mobile app marketplaces and they make a natural business partner in that regard.
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