Samsung Wallet Starts Letting Users Upload State IDs and Driver’s Licenses

Samsung says you can add your driver’s license to Samsung Wallet, with plans to let apps use the ID for age authentication sooner or later. The announcement got here Thursday on the Samsung Developer Conference.

Digital verification helps you to retailer vital well being and id info in your machine, and Samsung has been enjoying catch-up with Apple in bringing this know-how to its merchandise, launching Samsung Wallet for Galaxy telephones solely in June 2022. Not solely has Apple had its personal Wallet app and performance for years for the iPhone, it began letting customers add their state IDs and driver’s licenses again in September 2021 (here is find out how to add your ID to Apple Wallet).

Samsung Galaxy telephone homeowners with licenses and IDs from Arizona and Iowa would be the first so as to add their paperwork to Samsung Wallet, beginning later this 12 months. The firm is working with “a number of extra early-adopting states” in response to a press launch, nevertheless it’s unclear when extra states will likely be added.

Digital identification by Samsung Wallet could quickly be accepted at choose airports. Samsung is working with the US Transportation Security Administration on a take a look at program to simply accept smartphone-based IDs at 25 airports nationwide that additionally at the moment settle for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, together with state-based cellular ID apps. Only two states are listed within the TSA’s program for DMV-linked apps: Iowa and California, which simply expanded its restricted cellular ID trial into a bigger pilot part.

In early 2024, Samsung will launch a software program improvement package for builders to combine on-line age and identification info into their apps, with the presumed plan to permit them to make use of Samsung Wallet ID information to confirm customers.

Digital verification saved in telephone “wallets” is essentially the most present methodology machine makers have used to retailer vital knowledge to be used in the actual world. Google Wallet initially launched in 2011 as a cellular fee service app, nevertheless it was supported by just one financial institution (or pay as you go card quantities) and labored solely with Google’s Nexus telephones. 

The rebranded Android Pay launched in 2015 round a flurry of different cellular fee companies (Apple Pay arrived in 2014 and Samsung Pay in 2015) earlier than Google adopted Apple in storing extra authentication in a rebranded Google Wallet at Google I/O 2022.