SAN FRANCISCO—On Thursday, Google officially announced a revamped version of Google Wallet called Android Pay. The new Android Pay API will be an open platform that will allow developers to incorporate payments into their Android apps. Customers will be able to pay for things in brick-and-mortar stores via Near Field Communications (NFC) or through apps.

At launch, Android Pay will work in more than 700,000 store locations, although many of them have long accepted Google Wallet, including McDonald's, Macy's, and Whole Foods. The new payments platform will also be integrated into more than 1,000 apps, like Lyft, Domino's, and Etsy, Google said.

"Mobile payments has been a big priority for Google for a while,” a Google representative told Ars in a briefing earlier this week. To drive that point home, Android Pay will be available on all phones running KitKat or higher that also have NFC chips. A Google spokesperson said that seven out of 10 Android phones in use today have NFC capabilities.

Beyond an NFC chip and relatively more current software, Android phones won’t need any other hardware to make use of Android Pay. That’s consistent with a statement we received from a source back in February saying that Android Pay would rely on Host Card Emulation (HCE) rather than a Secure Element that isolates the payment information from the rest of the phone. Google Wallet has used HCE for years.

Android Pay will integrate with the operating system’s security as well, so users won’t have to deal with a separate PIN or password to authenticate payments. With Android M, devices will also be able to support fingerprint reading, so appropriately equipped phones will let users authorize payments with a fingerprint.

Probably the biggest step away from Google Wallet for Android Pay will be the use of tokenization to transfer card details from a merchant to a bank. This open standard was popularized by Apple Pay last fall and is seen as more secure than other methods of transferring card information because the merchant and the issuer trade numbers that represent a person’s real card number rather than the card number itself.

Because of this, however, users will not be able to keep a balance in an Android Pay account as they did with Google Wallet. Instead, Google will ask users to link their debit and credit cards directly to Android Pay.

Still, the rise of Android Pay doesn’t mean that Google Wallet will be cast aside. Google will keep Wallet around largely as it has existed in the past, allowing users to keep balances and send money to each other, as well as spend that balance in a store or withdraw the money from an ATM.

A spokesperson told Ars that Google is working with card networks and issuers to "have them all on board prior to the launch." That's different from Google Wallet's launch four years ago when the company only had a few bank partners, limiting the number of potential customers who could use the service. After several months, Google needed to widen its net, so it introduced a Virtual Card into the Wallet system. When users went to buy something, Google would load the Virtual Card with a prepaid amount and pay the merchant from that virtual card, thus circumventing the need to get issuer approval for Google Wallet transactions. While Google won’t confirm it, some have suggested that the company was actually losing money on each Google Wallet transaction as a result. So it’s no wonder that the company is eager to take a new tack.

Android Pay will launch sometime this summer.