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The Pixel 6a launched two days ago, and many people assumed it will include the same fingerprint scanner as its siblings, but that won’t be the case. The Pixel 6a will ship with a different fingerprint scanner than the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro.
The Pixel 6a is coming with a different fingerprint scanner than the Pixel 6 & 6 Pro
This has been confirmed by Rick Osterloh, Google’s Senior Vice President of Devices and Services. He confirmed that to Android Central during Google I/O 2022.
On one hand, this is a bit surprising, but on the other, not so much. Why? Well, you’d immediately assume that Google will keep things simple, and just use what it used in the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro last year. Luckily, that’s not the case.
The fingerprint scanner inside those two phones is not great, to say the least. Its performance is considerably worse than you’d think. Many smartphones out there have great in-display fingerprint scanners, both optical and ultrasonic ones.
That’s not the case with the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. That fingerprint scanner is slow, and not too accurate. Google improved things with updates, to a degree, but it’s still not what you’d expect it to be.
We do hope that this fingerprint scanner will offer better performance
That’s why we’re happy Google went the other way with the Pixel 6a. We can only hope that the fingerprint scanner inside the Pixel 6a will perform much better than the one inside the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro.
There are no guarantees for that, though, of course. This is almost certainly also an optical fingerprint scanner, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The vast majority of companies rely on them, and they’ve been working great thus far.
Unfortunately, though, we won’t know how well this fingerprint scanner performs until July. That’s when the Pixel 6a will make its way to the market. To be more accurate, it will become available to pre-order on July 21, and available to purchase on July 28.
The Pixel 6a is coming to 13 countries. So it will be available in a lot more markets than the Pixel 5a, which was limited to the US and Japan.