The first mandatory Russian application

  • Dec 11, 2020

It looks like our rulers have chosen the first app to be required to install on all new smartphones from July 1, 2020. To my great surprise, it was Mir Pay.


The Russian President recently signed a law according to which smartphones, tablets and laptops must be supplied with pre-installed Russian software from July 1, 2020. The law does not define the list of applications for mandatory installation, it must be approved by July 1.

By Izvestia newspaper report A meeting of the working group of the Federal Antimonopoly Service took place, at which the possibility of preinstalling the Mir Pay application on gadgets sold in Russia was discussed.

Mir Pay allows you to pay with a smartphone equipped with NFC using MIR cards (Google Pay and Apple Pay MIR cards, however, like Chinese Unionpay, do not support).

Everything is fine, but there are many nuances.

Firstly, Mir Pay works only with the cards of some banks. MIR cards issued by the most popular banks Sberbank and Tinkoff do not work with Mir Pay. Here is the full list of banks that support Mir Pay as of today, 12/28/2019:

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Secondly, Mir Pay, apparently, still does not support payment at turnstiles in the Moscow metro, and this is very important due to shares. More precisely, payment was definitely not supported in September, but I have not heard that it was done. Here is Mir Pay's response to my review on Google Play:


Thirdly, where Mir Pay is supposed to work, problems often arise. Here's a typical Google Play review:


The app has a very low rating and most of the 2,700 reviews are, alas, negative.


I will say a few words about how Mir Pay and Google Pay work together on one smartphone. This has been done quite conveniently: you can configure it so that payment goes through Mir Pay when the application is open. In this case, payment by default will be through Google Pay, and if you need to pay by MIR, just launch the Mir Pay application before paying.

I believe that the creation of the MIR National Payment System was the right step. The MIR cards themselves already work without any problems and are accepted everywhere, but payment with a smartphone through the Mir Pay application now more often does not work than it does. Perhaps the banks are more to blame for this, and not the creators of the application, but that is what it is. Maybe a miracle will happen and before July 1, payment with a smartphone will work fine, but there is reason to doubt it.

© 2019, Alexey Nadezhin
The main topic of my blog is technology in human life. I write reviews, share experiences, talk about all sorts of interesting things. My second project -
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