Android 16’s new Wallet shortcut is missing on some Pixels, and Google won’t say why

While Android 16 is light on new user-facing features, it delivers a few genuinely useful additions for Pixel owners. You can now double-press the power button to open Google Wallet (or your default wallet app), making it quicker to switch your active credit card or transit pass on the go. This is a simple quality-of-life improvement for frequent Google Wallet users, but strangely, Google has limited the feature to newer Pixels only.

On my Pixel 8 Pro running Android 16 QPR2 Beta 1, a “Double press power button” page under Settings > System > Gestures lets me choose between launching the Pixel Camera app and Google Wallet. On my Pixel 7 Pro running the same software version, however, this page is absent. Instead, it only has the older “Quickly open camera” page, with a simple toggle for the camera shortcut.

This doesn’t appear to be isolated to my Pixel 7 Pro. My colleague, Hadlee Simons, is also missing the shortcut on his device, as are several users on Reddit and Telegram. When Hadlee reached out to Google, a spokesperson said the “new Wallet shortcut experience” is rolling out “in the coming weeks to Pixel 8 phones and up with Android 16 outside of India and Russia.” While the response didn’t explain why the feature is missing on the Pixel 7 Pro, it did confirm that it’s exclusive to the Pixel 8 and newer devices.

As for the odd timing mentioned in Google’s statement — telling us a feature is rolling out “in the coming weeks” when it’s been live in Android 16 for months — it’s because the company was referring to the new Wallet shortcut UI that was spotted last week. Curiously, this new UI won’t be available in India or Russia, though the shortcut itself functions there. We can only speculate on the reasons, but they could range from market-specific decisions in India to ongoing issues with Google services in Russia.

While Google’s statement confirmed the omission on older Pixels isn’t a bug, it didn’t rule out a technical limitation. However, my own investigation suggests there isn’t one. The open-source version of Android, AOSP, doesn’t hide the Wallet shortcut by default. Google intentionally disabled it on older Pixels by changing a configuration value (config_doubleTapPowerGestureMode) to restrict the double-press gesture to the camera app only.

When I manually overrode this value on my Pixel 7 Pro, the Wallet shortcut immediately became available and worked flawlessly in my testing. After all, if the hardware can handle launching the camera with a double-press, why not the Wallet app? We can’t think of any good technical reason for this limitation, and since Google didn’t provide one, your guess is as good as ours.