De-GCashification

2026-09-12

If you aren't into rants, skip this one.

1. GCash is the e-wallet service that popularized the idea of cashless payments in the Philippines. There were/are others, but GCash is the Colgate of cashless here.

2. I recall it became extremely prominent during Covid and that, for a time afterwards, it felt like the only way to do cashless payments without ridiculous fees was to use GCash itself.

3. GCash has a SUPREMELY annoying app. Among its sins:

   1. The app just feels like shit to use in general. It's like it's made of putty.

   2. It de-authenticates you from your phone after 90 days. Or so it claims. I recall a time when I had to do the authentication process every three days. Every single time, it sent an SMS OTP, and SMS here has no nines of reliability.

   3. When it forces you to authenticate again, it treats you like an idiot and makes you go through product tours for every screen. So in practice, if I had to authenticate again and I want to pay for something, I need to click through five coachmarks for the dashboard and then another five fucking coachmarks for the send money screen.

   4. It shows you full-screen ads. Apparently these are called "interstitial ads," except GCash doesn't do them interstitially but instead after showing you the dashboard for a second, so in the half-second between the neurons in my brain telling my finger to press send money and my finger touching the screen, the ad appears and valiantly parries me, protecting my balance from myself.

   5. The dismiss option on the ads takes like five taps to work.

   6. I'm in the middle of upgrading my phone as I write this. GCash is the only financial app on my phone that I haven't ported yet because it's making me wait four hours before I can even log in to "check if it's really me." Literally none of the other financial apps I have have done this.

4. Our authorities have been working hard to break the de facto monopoly GCash had on cashless payments. There are now a number of purely-digital banks that can send money between each other (and legacy banks) with minimal fees. Recipient information-sending has also been standardized on QR codes that every e-wallet or banking app can read.

5. As a software guy myself, I'm sympathetic to the idea that GCash might have technical debt, but try asking me for any of that sympathy when I'm holding up a line at the cashier because I have to do GCash's twelve labors before I can pay for parking.

6. I might choose to just leave GCash unported on my new phone and see how long I can get away with using Maribank or GoTyme to pay for stuff.