Here’s How Android Phones Will Soon Let You Store Driving Licenses

The feature will work on phones with secured hardware that will function even if you’re out of battery.

In the next couple of years, you can forget about carrying driving licenses in physical form and Android phones will help with that. According to a recent discovery, reported by the XDA Developer forum, the next Android release after Q in 2019 will most likely offer this feature.

It will let you save digital copies of such crucial documents and that will be secured by the phone’s hardware chip, something we have seen with the Titan security chip on Google Pixel phones lately.

This also means you don’t have to rely on third-party apps which is easy to break through for those looking to hack into your device. The feature is still in early development stage, but the report suggests that one can expect it to be available with Android R in 2020.

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And, if you’re wondering what’s different between an app supporting this feature and Android offering it natively, then Google has that covered. The feature will be available within a framework called IdentityCredential and the technology will work in such a way that even if your phone’s battery is low or dead, the digital ID would be easy to capture.

Hypothetically speaking, even if your phone’s battery is dead, the traffic police will be able to verify the documents in the chip using some kind of a sensor.

For added security, the framework will be lased around authentication keys, which will be only available to the owner of the phone.

Tokenisation has helped a great deal in protecting a person’s identity and this feature could benefit from its addition. This will also be limited to the use of the document, for instance, if you’re caught speeding on the road, then cops will only be able to see the details required for their records.

In fact, if the technology gets a major leg-up, expect cops to carry compatible device that will be able to read the ID without a person needing to take it out of his/her pocket.

In India, we already have an app that does the digitizing of important document, called DigiLocker. It is a smartphone app-based system that stores and display the user’s information in one place. The official, from the other end, uses the app-based setup to verify the documents against the national registry.

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To make use of this app, you’ll need to have an Aadhaar card to open an account. You would also be required to link your cellphone number to the account.