Google Wallet's working to make transit passes feel more at home (Update: Out now)

Update: April 8, 2025 (5:21 AM ET): It’s taken a while, but Google has quietly announced the ability to assign nicknames to your transit passes in Google Wallet. This comes over six months after we first spotted the feature (as seen in the original article below).

“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.

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.

But Wallet supports storing a whole lot more than just payment cards, and now it looks like the app is working to extend nickname support to some of that other content, as well. By enabling a software flag, we’re able to interact with a nickname field in Wallet for transit passes. The feature either isn’t fully implemented, or we were unable to trigger the right conditions for the rest of it to work, because the nickname you enter doesn’t yet display in the app’s main view. But just finding the ability to enter a nickname suggests this could be a work in progress, that we might hope to see in a more complete stage of operation soon.

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.