The largest carrier in the United States, Verizon became the last to roll out the option to pay for Play Store purchases via the monthly phone bill as it agreed for the facility. According to a tweet from Google, Verizon customers will be allowed to pay for applications, games and music purchases through their monthly phone bill in the next few weeks or so. Early reports this week said that Verizon would be offering the service soon. Other prominent carriers, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile have been offering the service for quite a while now.
Google is trying everything possible to make the Play Store more profitable, which was unable to generate revenues when it was branded as Android Market. Experts believe that the phone bill is a good way to boost customer spending as the monthly bill has a plethora of surcharges and other fees and taxes. The inclusion of another expense to it will probably go unnoticed to customers. On the other hand, critics believe that the phone bill is becoming an easy weapon for clever marketers to push new charges onto customers.
Verizon seems to have taken the critics’ perspective into consideration and has limited the spending on the Play Store that can be paid via the phone bill to $25 a month. This will ensure that customers do not go overboard with their purchases, which might happen since they do not have to make immediate payments and will also prevent people from defaulting on their payments towards the end if the bill is too high. Some customers of Verizon already have access to this service and the remaining ones will be allowed to make use of it within the coming weeks.
There were also rumors floating around that Verizon would incorporate Google Wallet into the system but it appears that the carrier is going its own way with another payment option called Isis that would be a competitor to Google Wallet. Isis is also a mobile wallet and works with virtual versions of all the debit cards and credit cards that are in your wallet. Unlike NFC which requires specific hardware on the smartphone, a virtual wallet works through the banking network to make payments over the phone. It appears that payments through NFC and virtual wallets will soon take over because of their security and convenience.
