Irish Eyes are Gleaming Because They’ve Got Android Pay

Good news recently arrived for Ireland, who now has one more option when it comes to making payments for things from a smartphone: Android Pay is now available in the region, and that’s going to open up some new opportunities for shopping.

Reports note that the payment system is already accepted by a wide array of Irish companies, covering just about everything from daily shopping needs to a quick bite to a night on the town; companies accepting Android Pay in Ireland include Eason, Mace, Londis, and Tesco.

All users need do—for those not already familiar with the service—is just wake up the phone and hold it to a payment terminal after putting the app in play and registering accordingly. That lets users pay right away, and there’s even information after the fact about the transactions recently engaged in.

This is just the latest in a series of expansion efforts for Android Pay as it tries to wrest a little of the market from Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and the host of alternatives that have already been in place for weeks now.

It’s going to be a big job no matter how you lay it out, but Android Pay certainly has quite a bit going for it. Naturally, the biggest is that it works with Android devices, so that’s a huge block of potential users in place and ready to go. The downside, of course, is that everyone has been frantically working on their own mobile payment systems, and by “everyone,” I mean “literally just about everyone.”

From individual stores to individual device makers, mobile payments are a huge part of the landscape and Android Pay is fairly well behind the curve.

It may be able to make some greater moves in countries like Ireland—we’ve already established that Europe’s fairly eager to use mobile payments—but it may well have come too late to the party to really set itself up in proper style. Only time will tell just how well this works, but right now, Android Pay may end up just another also-ran in the midst of a very competitive field.