Fingerprint Authentication using BiometricPrompt Compat

For past 2 years, I have been working on some apps which use FingerprintManager intensively. Those apps had different UI requirements for fingerprint authentication flow and the reason was that the project owners wanted to have fingerprint authentication screen similar to their favorite apps.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Fingerprint authentication screen on 3 different Android apps

As you can see, even though all of those apps are in fingerprint authentication screen, each of them has different look and feel. In my opinion, certain types of user experience should be standard on Android devices regardless of which app you use. This type of experience was missing from FingerprintManager.

If you wanted to use FingerprintManager in your app, as a developer, you had to handle the UI part of your fingerprint authentication and you could use one of following solutions:

• Design UI, implement fingerprint dialog, manage its state, add custom error handling, etc.
• Copy and paste the code from Google’s sample
• Use 3rd party libraries which can handle fingerprint authentication for you.

These solutions weren’t perfect and the fact of not having standard UI was annoying for me.