Android customers who don’t like being forced to use Google’s proprietary checkout system to pay for their apps may soon have a new choice thanks to a budding partnership with Paypal.
Many Android owners, myself included, never bothered to sign up for a Google Checkout account until their first app purchase. It’s a cumbersome process, especially for users setting up the account directly from their phone. And that fact alone, I have no doubt, has stopped a fraction of users from buying any apps on the Android Market.
If customers could start paying for their apps with Paypal – a known entity for people as the most widely-accepted cross-merchant online payment platform. According to Bloomberg News, there are discussions taking place to determine if such a move could happen.
Not only would this be a boon to users who don’t like the idea of giving out their credit card information to too many outlets, it would also be good news to people who happen to have a lot of money in their Paypal accounts but not necessarily in their bank accounts.
Around 87 million users have an active Paypal account. Google Checkout has a very small bite of that.
Of course, the best thing that could happen for user flexibility is if app purchases could just be tacked on to the user’s mobile phone bill, like most wireless providers used to do and Blackberry still does. That’ll never happen with the complex cross-platform, cross-service nature of Android, though.
