[Update: Will work ‘soon’] Google Pay doesn’t work with Android 11 Beta 1

Ben Schoon | Jun 12 2020 - 1:25 pm PT

google pay cards and passes android power menu pixel

Yesterday’s debut of Android 11 Beta 1 brought along with it a handful of new features that might entice some users to jump on the early release. However, if you often rely on Google Pay, you should probably avoid the Android 11 Beta for now.

Google Pay is often a bit picky with new versions of Android, specifically when it comes to the NFC payment solution baked into the app. This is for the sake of security, so it’s understandable when early versions of Android or those with compromised security measures can’t run Google Pay.

After Google Pay appeared to be working properly on Android 11’s fourth developer preview, hopes were high that that would continue with the Android 11 Beta program. Well, those hopes were crushed.

Google Pay, unfortunately, isn’t working properly on the Android 11 Beta, at least not in this first release. If you try to set a new device up for the first time, the process will fail when you try to verify a card for in-store payments. Further, using a device that already had Google Pay set up before updating to the Android 11 Beta will work for a short period of time, but after a few hours the notification below will appear, revealing that Google Pay support has been cut off.

We’ve observed this notification or a failure to set up a card on all of our Android 11 Beta devices so far.

This is a real shame considering that one of the biggest new features of Android 11 is the revamped power menu, complete with Google Pay support! Since Pay stops working within a few hours of install, that menu becomes essentially useless. Shame!

Update 6/12: A day after publishing this story, A Google representative reached out to 9to5Google to clarify that Google Pay wasn’t actually meant to be blocked with the beta build. Google is aware there’s a problem and Google will be making Pay available to Android 11 Beta users “soon.”

We are aware some users can’t access Google Pay as part of the current build. We will be making it available soon.

Of course, we expect this to change at some point in the future. The final release will obviously offer Google Pay support, but later beta releases may also deliver the security measures needed to get things up and running.