Google Wallet Hid Loyalty Cards: 155 Reviews (2026)

Somewhere in the middle of May 2026, a lot of people opened Google Wallet at a supermarket till, looked for the loyalty card they had used every week for years, and could not find it. Some thought it had been deleted. One re-registered a card at the checkout that was, it turned out, still in the app. One stood at a train barrier opening passes one at a time, looking for today's ticket.

Nothing had been deleted. The cards had been moved, behind a button labelled "View more", and then behind a second one.

Google Wallet holds 4.34 stars from 2,241,814 Google Play ratings. 385,300 of those, 17.2% of everything the store has counted, are 1 to 3 stars. There is no iOS version to compare against: on an iPhone, the same job belongs to Apple Wallet.

Quick Answer: Where Did My Google Wallet Loyalty Cards Go?

Behind two taps. We pulled the 12,000 most recent Google Play reviews from the US storefront on 23 September 2026, a continuous run from 1 December 2025 covering 297 days with no gap, filtered to 2,165 substantial 1-3 star complaints, and hand-verified 155 about the redesign that took passes and loyalty cards off the main screen. From December to March there were none. In the week of 18 May they were 39.0% of every substantial complaint Google Wallet received. The new home screen shows your payment cards and four favourite passes, and everything else sits under "View more", then "View more passes". 22 reviewers mention the favourite star that controls those four slots, and several found, days later, that starring cards is how you put them back on the main screen. A small group of reviewers, rating the app four and five stars, say the redesign is an improvement.

How We Read These Reviews

We pulled the 12,000 most recent Google Play reviews for Google Wallet served to the US storefront on 23 September 2026, along with the live store metadata. Those reviews run from 1 December 2025 to 23 September 2026, 297 days, with at least one review on every day and no gap anywhere in the range. 5,328 were 1 to 3 stars, and 2,165 of those were substantial, meaning 120 characters or more of actual writing. 72.2% of the substantial negatives were one star.

One thing about this corpus is worth saying up front. Google Play serves English language reviews across storefronts, and a good number of these reviewers are plainly British: they mention Waitrose, Nectar cards, railway operators and the London Underground. We are reporting what the store served for the US storefront, and we are not claiming every reviewer is in the US.

The broad search is too broad, and we did not use it. Searching for layout words, "view more", "favourite", "main screen" and the rest returns 260 reviews. Many are about something else: a fingerprint prompt, the carousel for payment cards, a default card that switches itself, a flickering screen. We read all 260 and a second pass of every review from April onward that mentions passes, loyalty cards, gift cards or tickets, and kept only reviews that describe passes or cards becoming harder to reach after the redesign. That leaves 155 verified reviews, 7.2% of every substantial complaint in 297 days.

Only 85 of the 155, 54.8%, are one star, against 72.2% for the corpus as a whole. That is a large gap, and it fits what the reviews say. These read as daily users describing a change to something they rely on, and a good number of them hold back the last star.

Nothing, Then Four Out of Ten

Here is the shape of it, by month, as a share of all substantial complaints Google Wallet received in that month.

Week by week, the peak is higher still. The week of 11 May is 26.0%. The week of 18 May is 39.0% (32 of 82) and the week of 25 May is 36.8% (32 of 87). For two weeks, close to four substantial complaints in ten about Google Wallet were about where the passes had gone.

Builds say the same thing. Every Google Wallet build from 26.12 onward with at least 25 substantial negative reviews, with sub-builds of the same version combined:

Build 26.19 carries 45.5% of its own complaints on this subject, and 26.18 and 26.20 on either side of it are at 34.7% and 34.0%. The small bump at 26.15 is the April group, which we come to next.

It Arrived in Stages

The dates tell you this was not one switch flipped for everyone. The first complaint in the corpus is from 11 April, a one line objection to a "View More" button and "another View more". One more follows on 23 April and four on 24 April. Then only a trickle until the second week of May, when the wave starts. One reviewer puts a date on their own update:

The last update on 13th May has ruined this app. Why mess with something that worked so well? Now I can't see all my payment cards, not all my loyalty cards are shown and I have to wait for pages to load before I can find what I am looking for. Before, everything was in one place. It was easy to use, clean & simple. Now it's a total mess

The clearest sign of a staged release is a review from the day before the first complaint. On 10 April, a three star reviewer wrote that they had reinstalled the app and still did not have the new favourites option:

I do not have the updates. I have reinstalled the app but I don't have the options such as "favorites" to manage most utilized cards. what else do I need to do?

Some people were waiting for the redesign while others were already reviewing it. The wave in late May is the point at which it reached most of the people in this corpus.

What Actually Changed

The single most useful review in the corpus spells out the new path step by step:

The latest update (late May 2026) has a significantly worse user interface. Formerly all payment types and passes were available by scrolling the main screen. Now it only displays payment cards then 4 favourite passes. Viewing lesser used passes requires tapping View more, then scrolling down and tapping View more passes, which displays them in most recently used order. Then to see an alphabetical list requires pressing the alphabetical sort button. It's much more difficult to use!

The rest of the cluster agrees on the details. 31 of the 155 name the "View more" or "more passes" buttons. 19 say the first screen shows only four items, and they are not sure how those four were picked:

Hate the new layout, and quite how you decided which four passes were my starred ones, goodness knows. It was not based upon their position in the old app, how often I used them, when I added them (oldest or newest) or any other parameters. Finally to not mention such a significant change in the "What's new"? Did you not think your customers would notice (and hate it?)

That reviewer also raises the question of notice. Five reviewers say the change arrived without warning, and this one points out that it was not in the "What's new" notes.

Ten People Thought Their Cards Were Gone

Ten of the 155 describe believing, at least at first, that their cards had been deleted or removed, when they had only been moved.

Why have you moved all the saved loyalty cards away from the Wallet immediate view list in the last update without warning? I initially thought they had all been deleted. More clicks required to hunt them down 😮

Shame on whoever thought it was a good idea to "de-simplify" what should be a seamless checkout experience. I opened the app at a busy grocery store register and my credit and loyalty cards were completely gone from the main screen, buried under a messy new layout and pointless menu options.

One reviewer, quoted in our opening, found a card "buried" so thoroughly that they registered it again at the checkout. That review is the redesign in miniature: the card existed, the owner could not see it, and the cost landed at the till.

We are keeping this separate from a real and different complaint in the same corpus, where cards and passes were genuinely wiped by an update. Those reviews exist, they are not about the layout, and we did not count them here.

The Cost Lands at the Till

The reason this complaint is so angry is where people discover it. 23 of the 155 tie the problem to the moment of paying or showing a pass: a shop queue, a cashier, a checkout, a ticket barrier, a conductor.

Now it takes three clicks to go through to find a saved loyalty card instead of just one, unless it's in your top four. Not good when you're standing at the cashier and there's a queue waiting behind you. Please put it back. It wasn't broken, so didn't need 'fixing'.

The new update has destroyed the app. I have a laundry list of royalty cards for everything from gas to groceries. I have to go through 3 different menus to get to a card and then 3 different menus to get back. It has literally made me revert to physical cards.

That second reviewer says the redesign has sent them back to plastic cards. Three more reviewers say the same thing, which is the outcome a wallet app exists to prevent.

19 of the 155 are about train, bus, transport or boarding passes, and for them the change is worse than slower. Passes bought on the day used to appear at the top automatically. Now they do not.

The latest version isn't a backwards step it's a leap off a cliff. I primarily use wallet for transport passes that are bought on the day. In the old version they appeared at the top of the list on the front screen. 1 tap. Done. Now they don't appear at all on the front screen or on the next one. 3 taps! Sounds a bit nit picking? Maybe but really really annoying! I'm sure it works for other people but definitely not for me.

Terrible update. I used this for daily travel passes as it was better than my railway company's own app. Since update the home page no longer automatically orders passes with newest at top, making it basically unusable. Standing at ticket barrier having to open every pass to try and find the right day's is not acceptable. Please roll back or at least show date on pass thumbnails.

A four star reviewer spotted the same gap back in April: a travel pass added today is not put on the home screen, so opening the app shows yesterday's ticket instead.

The Favourite Star Is the Fix, and Nobody Was Told

22 of the 155 mention favourites or the star icon, and reading them in date order is like watching people discover the setting one at a time.

I have gift cards which now I can't see the balance, I have to click in. not too mention they disappeared until I realised I had to mark them as favourites.

A useful app when it worked. Now it shows only 4 of my 8 cards (Wallet website shows all 8 cards are still present tho 4 are hidden). EDIT Solution from Google Community): in Wallet, the "+" button now looks like a "+" button with the label "View more" - this is actually 2 separate buttons. Select "View More" button to get to lists of cards and select each card as a Favourite (by selecting star icon near to it). All favourited cards now show in Wallet.

That review, rated one star, ends with the workaround the reviewer found on Google's community forum: the "View more" label is a separate button from the "+", and each card you want on the main screen has to be starred. Two reviewers who rated the app four stars found the same route on their own:

No stars for the update which had me foundering at the till for my nectar card to get cheap prices. BUT at home later I found that if you click view more then manage passes on home you can add as many as you like to the home screen. I don't know why Google couldn't tell us that! 🤬

Latest change doesn't make it quicker to find the card you are looking for. A backward step. This is getting really annoying. Why only show 4 cards that the system chooses? UPDATE. You can add your cards to the home screen but it wasn't clear this is an option. I have all my cards showing now just as before the update. Now up to 4 stars.

That last one ends with the reviewer's cards all showing, just as before the update, and the rating going up to four. So the redesign does have a way back to something like the old layout. The problem the corpus documents is that people had to find it at the till, or on a forum, or by accident at home later.

It does not work for everyone. One reviewer does not want to star a train ticket that is only valid for a day, and another says new gift cards default to the hidden list, so the starring never ends:

I no longer see my train tickets unless I press view more, I don't want to star them as they are only valid for a day. How do these changes make it through user testing

Some People Like It

It would be dishonest to leave this out. Searching the four and five star reviews from April onward finds a small group who prefer the new version: one calls the two column layout less cluttered and welcomes the search bar, one says it fixed their request for favourites and search, and one new user says they cannot fault it. Two others like the redesign or its look and object only to details, one of them to the same double "View more".

Needs search, favorites, frequently used. A better way to find the card you need, when you need it. NEW UPDATE Fixes all these issues, great work!

Replaced my old phone and have just started using the new wallet app. I've read a lot of negative reviews about the latest update, but I honestly can't fault it. Admittedly I don't have a lot of payment methods or loyalty cards, but those that I do use are there on the home screen. Very simple to switch between a loyalty card and a payment method - seems easier than the previous version. Quite happy so far

The second reviewer states the condition plainly: they do not have a lot of cards. That is the pattern in both groups. A redesign that shows four favourites works well for someone with four cards. It does not work for someone with thirty loyalty cards and a daily train ticket.

32 Asked for the Old Layout Back

32 of the 155 ask, in so many words, for the old layout, or for a setting that restores it. The complaint has also shifted since the spring. Since the end of August, six reviewers describe a second change, to the pass view itself, where barcodes now sit in a two column layout that is harder to scan. We did not count these six in the 155, because they are about reading a pass rather than finding one.

The new interface means I can't scan the Waitrose loyalty card anymore. Every time I have to go to the top corner and select the old view. Can't you make this configurable? Does anyone at Google actually use this feature?

Was good before. The new update makes it impossible to scan the loyalty cards to pick up the self scanners as the barcode is either too small or in the middle of the screen which doesn't fit under their scanners as those can only reach the top 1/4 of a screen. It should be turned back to the previous layout

The share of complaints about the redesign never went back to zero: 3.3% in August, 4.4% in September, against 0.0% for the four months before April. Four months after the wave, it still accounts for three or four complaints in every hundred.

What Reviewers Say Works

For anyone looking for their cards today, the corpus supports a short list. Tap "View more", then "View more passes", to reach the full list; it opens in recently used order, and an alphabetical sort is one more tap away. To put a card back on the main screen, star it as a favourite, or use the option to manage passes on home that two four star reviewers found; one of them got every card back on the first screen that way. Passes that seem to have vanished may have been archived, and one reviewer describes unarchiving them from several menus deep before starring them. And if a barcode in the new pass view will not scan, two reviewers say the control in the top corner switches back to the old single column view, though neither found a way to make it the default.

Read the Full Breakdown

You can read the full negative review breakdown for Google Wallet on Android, or go straight to the trust check and apps like it. For another redesign that moved a familiar control, see Discord's new UI and gift button and the Samsung Health layout update. For other Google apps that stopped doing what people opened them for, see Google Maps that will not stay in satellite view and Gmail's blank screen.