You know how you have to carry a driving license everywhere with you, or any other physical forms of ID? These days are about to come to an end, thanks to Google and Qualcomm. These two tech giants have made a partnership that will bring electronic ID capabilities to the next release of Google’s operating system – Android R.
At the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, the companies showed that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform would be the first mobile system-on-a-chip that has support for Android Identity Credential APIs in Android R. Android R will be launched next year.
Many aspects of our lives are anyway included on our mobile phones, even the boarding passes, the credit cards, and the shopping vouchers. Digital ID cards, which will be secured with biometric authentication, is the next step.
This could actually mean that a user is able to store their driving license on a mobile device in order to confirm their identity offline and online. This could actually speed up the authentication processes for buying different services and goods. This also means that we will get an extra layer of security protection for mobile users.
Neither Google nor Qualcomm has given us details about how the APIs actually work. However, we understood that Google is working on a mobile driving license standard for smartphones, but we have no launch date yet.
The service will probably come to be part of the Snapdragon 865 platform, which was announced by Qualcomm this week. Apparently, it will power the majority of 2020’s top Android smartphones.
Sudhi Herle, from Google, stated that they are very thankful to have this partnership with Qualcomm in order to improve the state of Android security. In the past year, they have worked a lot to make sure that Android users feel safe.
