Google Wallet loyalty cards are getting a redesign. Here's what yours will look like

Google has told its Wallet partners, Leal included, that it is rolling out a full redesign of Wallet passes this summer. Loyalty cards, event tickets, boarding passes, gift cards, offers: all of it.

If you run a loyalty programme with Leal, your customers’ Android cards are about to look noticeably better. And the honest headline is this: you do not have to do anything. No reissuing cards, no asking customers to add them again, no downtime. Google rerenders passes on their side, so the card already sitting on your customer’s phone quietly becomes the new design.

It is still worth understanding what is changing, because there is one thing that deserves five minutes of your time.

What the old design looks like

Right now a Google Wallet loyalty card is a rounded rectangle floating on a grey page. Your brand colour fills the card, the barcode and stamp count sit inside it, and any image you have added shows up as a thin strip along the bottom.

It works. It is just a bit contained. Your branding amounts to a small round logo and a slice of colour.

What the new design looks like

The card now fills the entire screen. Google describes the underlying change as a move to “component based rendering”, which is developer speak for a pass assembled from stackable blocks rather than drawn as one fixed card. In practice, five things change.

Your brand colour takes over the whole screen. No more grey border. When a customer opens your card they are looking at your colour, edge to edge.

Your business name gets much bigger. The title renders at a far larger size and can wrap onto two lines. Short, punchy names read beautifully here. “The Bean and Bagel Co. Loughborough Branch” rather less so.

Your image becomes the star. This is the big one. That thin strip at the bottom is now a large, full width band, the biggest visual element on the card after the colour itself.

Actions become proper buttons. Nearby locations, call us, visit website now render as tinted, tappable components instead of plain grey list rows.

Settings move out of the way. Toggles for notifications, sharing, archiving and removing the pass now live on their own screen. The main card view is cleaner for it.

The one thing worth checking

Here is the catch, and it is a nice problem to have.

When your image was a thin strip along the bottom of a card, a wide banner shaped image made sense. Now that it is a large, nearly square block filling most of the screen, an old wide banner will look stretched, cropped or oddly letterboxed.

Google’s updated guidelines now ask for a hero image that is roughly square, around 1032 by 812 pixels, with a little breathing room top and bottom so nothing important gets clipped. They also ask you not to bake text into the image, since text in an image cannot be translated for customers using their phone in another language.

So if you set up your Leal card a while back and dropped in a wide logo banner, it is worth swapping it for something that fills a chunky, almost square space. A good photo of your best selling flat white. Your shopfront. Your team. Think small poster rather than website header.

Good hero images for the new design:

• A genuinely nice photo of your product, shot well and shot bright
• Your interior or shopfront, if it has character
• A bold illustration or pattern in your brand colours
• Anything you would be happy to see blown up on a phone screen

What to avoid:

• Wide, thin banners, which were right for the old design and wrong for this one
• Text baked into the image, which will fight with the much larger title
• Low resolution files pulled off social media
• Anything where the important part runs right to the top or bottom edge

You can change this in your Leal dashboard in about thirty seconds, and it pushes out to every customer who already has your card. No reissuing, no notification spam. Just a better looking card the next time they open it.

While you are in there: colour

Full screen brand colour is lovely, right up until it is neon.

Google’s guidance is explicit about avoiding highly saturated colours, the electric cyans and acid greens, because text starts to bleed into the background and readability falls apart. That was a minor issue when the colour filled a small card. It is a much bigger deal when it fills an entire screen.

If your brand colour lives in that zone, consider a slightly deeper or softer version of it for your wallet card specifically. Your customers will thank you for being able to read their stamp count.

Does anything break?

No. Google has been clear on this, and we have checked it against our own integration.

The data your card sends is unchanged. The way customers add your card is unchanged. Cards already installed on phones move to the new look automatically. Your stamp counts, rewards and customer history all carry across untouched.

It is a repaint, not a rebuild.

Apple is heading the same way

This is not only a Google story. Apple announced a similar shift at WWDC this year: a Poster style arriving in iOS 27, built around a large full bleed background image with the pass details laid over the top. Loyalty and rewards cards are among the pass types that can use it.

Both wallets are moving in the same direction. Bigger imagery, more room for your brand, less clutter around it. The practical upshot is that one strong image now carries more weight than it used to on both platforms. Getting that image right is a rare piece of small business marketing work that pays off on every phone, in both wallets, for as long as your programme runs.

What Leal is doing about it

Nothing you need to worry about, which is rather the point.

We handle the Wallet integration, so the redesign lands on your cards automatically. We have reviewed our pass templates against Google’s updated guidelines covering hero image dimensions, logo masking, colour contrast and character limits, so cards created in Leal are built to the new standard out of the box.

If you are curious what is inside a wallet pass, our free pass.json validator and pkpass inspector let you look inside one locally in your browser.

Not running a wallet loyalty programme yet? This is a good moment to start, because your card will launch straight into the new design. Create your first card free, it takes about fifteen minutes.