PayPal Announces Android Market Payment Support, Quickly Pulls It

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Well, well, well. An eagle-eyed reader tells us PayPal posted a short announcement yesterday on its corporate blog, only to pull it mere seconds later. As you can tell from the URL, PayPal was poised to announce support for “all three major mobile platforms” (also see retweets of the blog post).

That is: support for Apple’s App Store, Blackberry App World … and Android Market.

How do we know? Thanks to a little something called Google cache (screenshot below for posterity).

We don’t know why the announcement was pulled, but presumably the news will be spread at PayPal’s X Innovate conference today and someone simply pulled the trigger on the blog post a bit too soon.

Not that word of the deal hadn’t gotten out prior to PayPal’s developer conference (see here, here and here).

Nevertheless, the news will make a lot of Android app developers and publishers smile.

(Hat tip to Eric Wijngaard)

Company: PayPal
Website: paypal.com
Launch Date: December 1, 1998
Funding: $197M

PayPal is an online payments and money transfer service that allows you to send money via email, phone, text message or Skype. They offer products to both individuals and businesses alike, including online vendors, auction sites and corporate users. PayPal connects effortlessly to bank accounts and credit cards. PayPal Mobile is one of PayPal’s newest products. It allows you to send payments by text message or by using PayPal’s mobile browser. PayPal created the Gausebeck-Levchin test, which is an implementation...

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Company: Android
Website: android.com
Launch Date: October 2003

In August 2005, Google acquired Android, a small startup company based in Palo Alto, CA. Android’s co-founders who went to work at Google included Andy Rubin (co-founder of Danger), Rich Miner (co-founder of Wildfire), Nick Sears (once VP at T-Mobile), and Chris White (one of the first engineers at WebTV). At the time, little was known about the functions of Android other than they made software for mobile phones. This began rumors that Google was planning to enter...

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