Android Pay support may soon be coming to Android Wear

... But you might need to buy a new watch to use it.

With Samsung and Apple already offering NFC payments on their smartwatches, it was only a matter of time until Android Pay caught up with its own wrist-based payment option. And now strings dug up by Android Police from within the latest Google Play Services APK file suggest it might be happening sooner rather than later. (Or at the very least, that Googlers may be testing it out in the wild.)

The strings discovered in an XML file inside the app, which would presumably appear in a menu of some sort, refer to adding an account for Android Pay, and holding the watch over a payment terminal. Pretty obvious what that's all about, then. Clearly Google is preparing the UI for Android Pay on Android Wear.

However, not all current Android Wear devices will be able to use the feature when it rolls out — perhaps alongside the upcoming Android Wear 2.0 in early 2017 — because many popular models like the Huawei Watch and Moto 360 don't have NFC support. The most notable watches that do support this essential feature are ASUS's ZenWatch series. It's likely any new hardware launching alongside Wear 2.0 would feature NFC, and that Android Pay would be one of the tentpole features of the wide-ranging refresh of Google's wearable platform.

As for whether Google can make the experience of waving your smartwatch-laden arm over a payment terminal any less awkward than it sounds? We'll have to wait and see.

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