Google Pay Outage Hit Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo China Phones

Monday, 10 August 2026 at 08:23

If you're running a China-ROM phone from Xiaomi, Vivo, or Oppo and Google Pay stopped working for you a few days ago, you weren't imagining it. And the good news, before we get into how weird this got, is that it's apparently already fixed.

Here's what happened. A Google Play Services update, version 26.28, quietly started blocking contactless payments specifically on phones running Chinese firmware, even ones purchased or imported from mainland China but used elsewhere in the world. Global versions of these same phones were unaffected, this was purely about the ROM, not the brand or hardware.

A developer going by MarvinFS actually dug into the logs and found the smoking gun: Play Services was detecting a "CN SKU" and then disabling the TapAndPay HCE service outright. Translation, Google's software was specifically checking whether your phone was a China-market device and shutting off tap-to-pay if it was. That's not a vague bug report, that's a pretty deliberate-looking piece of code doing exactly what it says.

Summary

A Google Play Services update (version 26.28) briefly disabled Google Pay's contactless payment function specifically on China-ROM phones from Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, and OnePlus.
Global versions of the same phones were unaffected; the block was tied to detecting a "CN SKU" and disabling the TapAndPay service.
Affected devices included the Vivo X200 Ultra, X300 Pro/Ultra, X100 Ultra, Oppo Find N3, Find X9 Pro, and Xiaomi 17 Ultra, among others.
Temporary workarounds included rolling back Play Services or leaving all Google Play beta programs, which reportedly restored functionality.
Google appears to have resolved the issue, likely server-side, though it has not issued an official statement explaining the cause.

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What made this genuinely frustrating is that nothing else looked broken. Google Wallet opened fine, your cards were still listed, everything appeared normal right up until you actually tried to tap your phone at a terminal and got rejected. Reports rolled in from Europe and Brazil, and the affected device list grew fast, Vivo X200 Ultra, X300 Pro, X300 Ultra, X100 Ultra, the X Fold5 and X Fold3 Pro, Oppo's Find N3 and Find X9 Pro, Xiaomi's 17 Ultra and 13 Pro, plus a couple OnePlus models too.

"Google Play Services 26.28.63 was detecting the Vivo as a Chinese SKU and disabling the TapAndPay HCE service." — the line that turned a mysterious payment failure into a very deliberate-looking block.

For a while, there were a couple of workarounds floating around, one involved rolling back Play Services via ADB, which reset your whole wallet setup, not exactly convenient. The other, oddly, turned out to be simpler: leaving all beta programs in the Google Play Store settings, even if you'd never knowingly joined one. People reported that fixed it immediately, no restart tricks needed.

That workaround alone tells you something uncomfortable, whatever this was, Google clearly has the technical capability to disable Google Pay for an entire category of devices based on region detection. Whether it was a genuine bug or an experiment that leaked out onto real devices too early, nobody's saying.

Latest update as of this writing: Google appears to have resolved things on their end, likely server-side, since the manual workaround isn't even necessary anymore for most people. Still no official statement from Google explaining what actually happened, which, given how this looked from the outside, feels like something worth an explanation.