Amazon Wallet for Android stores your gift and loyalty cards

Ahead of the availability of the Fire Phone, Amazon has launched its Google Wallet competitor for Android smartphones on to its Amazon App Store for Android as well as Google's Play store. Dubbed Amazon Wallet, the app offers some of the basics that Google Wallet offers, primarily the fact that it could be used to store your gift cards as well as loyalty and rewards cards. At this time, unlike Google Wallet, it doesn't look like Amazon Wallet is payment-ready.

That said, Amazon could potentially expand into the payments arena in the future if it chooses to, after all the company already has a lot of credit card information saved and already operates Amazon Payments for third-party merchants so this could be a natural extension. At this time, though, payments isn't on the books for Amazon Wallet.

And though the features may be similar to what Google offers, in my quick use of Amazon Wallet it seems that the Google app is more robust and feature-rich. Both apps will allow you to scan your card's front and rear so you can have an image to remind you which card is which, and both apps allow you to scan in bar codes so you don't have to sit there and manually enter a long string of numbers for each card you are trying to input. That said, Google Wallet will also auto-populate the name of the retailer or business for you and Google's database appears more complete than the Amazon one.

Have you tried Amazon Wallet? Are you using these wallet features from Amazon, Google, and others to make your wallet thinner?