When Android smartphones fist started shipping with fingerprint sensors, they were fairly limited because they weren’t natively supported by Android itself. This led to fingerprint sensors that could only really be of use in custom software from the original manufacturer. A prime example would be the fingerprint sensor found in many Chinese devices and the OnePlus 2 that can’t really be used for much beyond safely unlocking your device. Samsung knew that this would be a problem and came up with their own Fingerprint API to allow developers the option to leverage the new hardware in the Galaxy S5 onwards. Google caught up last year with the release of Android 6.0 Marshmallow and now devices running Marshmallow and have a fingerprint sensor have many more uses available to them.
One more of those uses to add to the ever-growing pile is signing in to your banking app, if you’re a Bank of America account holder at least. The firm has updated their Android app to support the Marshmallow Fingerprint API as well as the Samsung Fingerprint API that it used to support. This means that the Bank of America app will now allow users to sign in to their bank account using their fingerprint on any Android device with a sensor running Marshmallow. It’s taken them long enough to add this sort of feature, and it should make for a more secure sign in method and perhaps speed things up for users.
There are a couple more new features included in this latest update as well, such as the ability to choose how the Bank of America app takes a photo of a check and the option to view and order your own customized checks from within the app. While not everyone banks with the Bank of America, it’s nice to see one of the larger banks in the United States adopt new features like these. This now means that users with a Nexus 6P, modern Samsung smartphone or any other device running Marshmallow and a fingerprint sensor will be able to take advantage of this extra authentication. If you’re a Bank of America account holder and have yet to give the app a try, clicking the big button below will help you try it out.