Many Samsung Wallet Users Aren't Happy With The App - Here's Why

Samsung Wallet used to be a fan-favorite among Galaxy users. As an all-in-one payment solution, it was comparable to competing services from Google and Apple, but with a few included perks that made it even more compelling. Not only was it a convenient place to store digital copies of your payment cards and passes, but it also integrated with hardware on Samsung Galaxy devices to allow payment at stores without tap-to-pay terminals.

However, many (though certainly not all) users have grown displeased with the app over the years. The story of Samsung Wallet's decline is part and parcel of an overall trend in the Korean tech giant's consumer products. For the past several years, Samsung has been on a cost-saving spree, paring back fan-favorite features. For some, this has caused frustration. Take the flagship Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which removed Bluetooth features from the included S Pen stylus. Over time, small cuts like those add up. In the case of Wallet, it only took a few key changes to push me away after many years of loyal use, and I don't seem to be alone.

Samsung Wallet was, at one point, a genuinely impressive product with features you couldn't find elsewhere. But after losing those features, very little now differentiates it positively from competitors like Google Wallet, while the stuff it gets wrong is enough to turn off many users. It doesn't help that the app tends to frustrate, with many users reporting bugs and crashes. Again, not everyone experiences these problems, but those who do are justifiably irritated. Here's everything that has Samsung Wallet users, past and present, feeling unhappy with their experience.

One look at the Google Play listing for Samsung Wallet provides a clear picture of the problems some users are facing. Complaints abound in reviews, with multiple users even claiming that all of their credit cards had been deactivated in the app without explanation. Other complaints include frequent app crashes, even more frequent spam notifications, and payment failures. All of those issues are legitimate deal-breakers for a wallet app. The entire point of a mobile wallet is defeated the moment you can't reliably use it to pay for purchases.

Meanwhile, the things it can do are often done better by Google Wallet. For instance, both apps will let you store rewards cards, event tickets, passes, and more, but Google can import many of them automatically by pulling them from your Gmail inbox. At the very least, there's usually an "Add to Google Wallet" button at the point of purchase. When it comes to Samsung, everything has to be imported manually.

Simply comparing Samsung Wallet to Google Wallet makes it clear that they have different priorities from the moment you open each app. Whereas Google immediately presents the user with a clean interface displaying a default payment card and a list of stored passes, Samsung blasts your eyeballs with enough advertisements to make you quit the app immediately. Another issue is that Samsung Wallet forces itself on users with a swipe-up shortcut that conflicts with Android's navigation gestures and feels deliberately designed to be triggered accidentally. It's enough to boil your blood the first time it happens, and by the third or fourth, anyone would be forgiven for deleting the app forthwith.

One prominent criticism of Samsung Wallet is that it has dropped some of its most innovative features over the years. The most prominent such example is MST payment, which made it possible to pay with your phone even with card readers that don't support NFC. Hovering your phone over an old-fashioned card swiper would transmit magnetic waves that the reader could pick up.

Samsung was clearly proud of this feature. A 2016 ad spot highlighting MST payments featured rap superstar Lil Wayne hanging out in a liquor store, pouring a bottle of champagne over his waterproof Galaxy S7, and astonishing the shopkeeper by hovering his dripping phone over an ancient payment terminal to pay for another bottle of bubbly. I enacted a similar scenario myself many times, though with considerably less swagger. At a time when NFC terminals in the U.S. were still sparse, MST payments gave me the peace of mind I needed to leave my wallet at home.

Samsung dropped MST in 2021, at which point many users decided there wasn't any point in sticking around. Or, more specifically, MST hardware stopped being included in new Galaxy handsets, starting with the Galaxy S21 series. Without any other innovative and useful features, the app felt much more generic. That was the point at which many users, myself included, jumped ship to Google Wallet. There are still plenty of Samsung Galaxy features we'd like to see in other phones, but it's clear that the company's payment app is something that needs a bit of attention to regain its former status among users.