- Google Wallet is working to let you assign nicknames to transit passes.
- While some signs of this functionality are present in the latest Google Play Services beta, others are not yet functional.
- The company announced the feature on April 8.
“With this new feature, you can add a nickname to your passes in Wallet,” Google noted in the changelog of an April 2025 Google Play Services update (version 25.13).
Original article: August 7, 2024 (11:21 AM ET): Smartphones are tiny computers, so it’s little wonder that they like working with information that’s nicely and neatly organized, all expressed formally. Problem is, we’re the ones who have to use them, and we are far from 100% logical, formal creatures. How often does that manifest in us turning to nicknames for labels — that guy who’s not in your contacts as “Brian James Miller,” but “Work Brian?” For people who get a lot of mileage out of this kind of shorthand, we’ve got some good news for you, as we check out the latest development work on Google Wallet.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Technically, we’re not quite looking at Wallet itself right now, as we investigate version 24.31.33 beta of Google Play Services. That software does the heavy lifting for a lot of Google apps behind the scenes, and that’s very much the case with Wallet. Right now, Wallet already lets you assign nicknames to your payment cards — and if you’re juggling more than a few, that’s an easy way to keep track of which you want to be using, when.
We’re also not sure if every pass you can add to Wallet will support the ability to use a nickname. At least, even with our testing flag set, we were able to assign a nickname for some transit docs, but not others. Right now, it’s probably far too early to say if that might be intentional, or more a consequence of a half-implemented software feature. We’ll have to keep poking away at this one and see if it’s working any better in future releases.