If you’ve never heard of the Wallet app, then nobody can really blame you. The app has been collecting dust in the app library of Windows Phone users for quite some time now, and has received absolutely no love from Microsoft since its release. The reviews page of the app on the Microsoft store is brutal, panning the app as “Fundamentally useless” and even “Fraudulent,” having Wallet suffer a 1.8 star rating. As far as Wallet is concerned, the path forward is decidedly unclear, and nobody can really make good predictions as to what’s happening to it.
This lack of certainty is only amplified by the recent updates to the app on the Microsoft store. The newest changelog reads as follows:
The following features are deprecated in Wallet:
• Credit or debit card support
• Wallet PIN
• Location awareness
• Date awareness
• Microsoft gift card
This is a fairly vague changelog, considering the word deprecate can potentially mean a whole host of things in this context – none of them good. As it stands, opening up the Wallet app will give you an empty screen, if you haven’t already put anything onto it. It doesn’t seem like the app is now giving users an opportunity to add any variety of card to the wallet, which was the app’s purpose to begin with.
With this culling of features, Wallet’s purpose and Microsoft’s plans for it going forward are anybody’s guess. If you’re one of the few people who depended on this app for anything, it might be time to make sure that you’ve got all of your cards backed up and stored the old fashioned way, just in case this app finds itself off of the Microsoft store in the near future.
Further reading: Apps, Microsoft, update, wallet, Windows Phone, Windows Store
