A word to the wise: Don't mess with Samsung Pay

[waqqas31]

Just thought I'd share my experience.

I'm using a SM-N9750 (SD Hong Kong and Taiwan variant), and despite being from outside Canada, I was always able to set up my Canadian credit cards with Samsung Pay and use them without issue.

I finally found the Catch 22 that Canadian debit cards will not work with a non-North American version of Samsung Pay (spoke to a dedicated Samsung Pay rep from my bank.) He did say that he couldn't rule out or confirm whether side-loading the right version of the app would work or not. FYI, the version on the Canadian variant was 3.7.65 and on mine was 3.9.10. The Samsung Pay Framework had the same version on both.

I uninstalled Samsung Pay and installed the apk from APKmirror.com. It installed fine (and I got excited) but after launching the app, I would get a "Failed to connect to server" error no matter what I tried. I gave up eventually and uninstalled 3.7.65 and re-installed 3.9.10. Upon launching, however, it found an update and wouldn't let me proceed without downloading it. After downloading the whole 100%, I would get a "Failed to download update" error, no matter what I tried. Again.

I removed 3.9.10 once again and downloaded straight from the Play Store. Some of the initial screens differed, but eventually it would fail at the same hurdle: Failed to download update.

All this to tell you, that I ended up doing a factory reset to get Samsung Pay working again (and still without support for Canadian debit cards.) I lost some data and learned some things along the way, but I wanted to save anyone else the anguish of learning this the hard way first-hand.

That said, my debit cards still work fine via Google Pay (if I ever find myself in such a situation), and regardless, I would still choose this variant over the Canadian one.

 

[Mike Dee]

Thanks for sharing

 

[msm0511]

This is a very niche issue that most people won't encounter. I don't think it's very fair to blame Samsung Pay for this particular issue.

That does really stink you had to go through all that trouble and lose some data for it not to work.

 

[adegbenroagoro]

Just thought I'd share my experience.

I'm using a SM-N9750 (SD Hong Kong and Taiwan variant), and despite being from outside Canada, I was always able to set up my Canadian credit cards with Samsung Pay and use them without issue.

I finally found the Catch 22 that Canadian debit cards will not work with a non-North American version of Samsung Pay (spoke to a dedicated Samsung Pay rep from my bank.) He did say that he couldn't rule out or confirm whether side-loading the right version of the app would work or not. FYI, the version on the Canadian variant was 3.7.65 and on mine was 3.9.10. The Samsung Pay Framework had the same version on both.

I uninstalled Samsung Pay and installed the apk from APKmirror.com. It installed fine (and I got excited) but after launching the app, I would get a "Failed to connect to server" error no matter what I tried. I gave up eventually and uninstalled 3.7.65 and re-installed 3.9.10. Upon launching, however, it found an update and wouldn't let me proceed without downloading it. After downloading the whole 100%, I would get a "Failed to download update" error, no matter what I tried. Again.

I removed 3.9.10 once again and downloaded straight from the Play Store. Some of the initial screens differed, but eventually it would fail at the same hurdle: Failed to download update.

All this to tell you, that I ended up doing a factory reset to get Samsung Pay working again (and still without support for Canadian debit cards.) I lost some data and learned some things along the way, but I wanted to save anyone else the anguish of learning this the hard way first-hand.

That said, my debit cards still work fine via Google Pay (if I ever find myself in such a situation), and regardless, I would still choose this variant over the Canadian one.

Thanks for the info.