Google has launched Smart Lock for Passwords on Android. By integrating Smart Lock for Passwords into the Android app, users can automatically sign in to the app using the credentials they have saved. Users can save both username-password credentials and federated identity provider credentials. Millions of user have been seamlessly signed in using saved accounts for over 40 major apps when going from one Android device to another or from Chrome to Android and vice versa. This first wave of developers have realized that removing the friction of sign-in increases user re-engagement, monetization opportunities, and cross-device analytics, improving the value and experience of their users.
The New York Times has seen 80 percent of their new sign-in events assisted by Smart Lock. Meanwhile, the Netflix customer support team found over a 20 percent reduction in support cases related to account recovery for their Android user base. Users strongly choose to stay signed in across their devices with over 60 percent opt-in to save sign-in info for major Smart Lock-enabled apps. And many of these developers were able to realize these gains with less than a day’s work by making only client-side changes to their app. To learn more about Smart Lock for Passwords, visit our developer site.
What’s New
With the latest release of Google Play services, it has made some enhancements to the Smart Lock for Passwords API to help you sign up new users or sign existing users in more quickly. Using the new method to retrieve sign-in “hints”, users will see a dialog with a list of email addresses that they can select in a single tap.
This new experience is particularly important with Android Marshmallow’s runtime permissions model. To simplify and improve the user experience, this dialog doesn’t require device permissions and includes any email addresses that the user has saved with Smart Lock, not just the accounts on the device. This means that user can improve sign-in and sign-up flows so that most of the users never need to type their email address. Apps using this dialog have seen nearly three-quarters of users select an entry shown, improving sign-up rates.
Next, after the user has tapped and shared their email address, with some server-side support, a sophisticated app can fully tailor the sign-in flow. By using the email address, user can check their database to see if a user has already registered for an account. User can then intelligently render either the sign-in or sign-up screens with their email address, name and profile photo pre-filled.
Skipping the Password Altogether
It’s possible to do even better: if the user chooses a Google account from the dialog, an OpenID Connect ID Token is provided. This can save app from having to verify email addresses for new accounts or skip the password altogether for returning users. ID tokens are also used by Google Sign-In to authenticate in place of a password, and are a strong assertion from Google that the owner of the given email addresses is present. If users on your site recover their passwords by email, then an ID token from Google is giving you the same assertion that the user owns the email address and is signed in to this device with that email address. User can also consider presence of ID token in addition to the password a signal to prevent password cracking and abuse.
Google has found that the majority of users on Android use the email address that’s signed in on their device as their account for third-party apps, so this means seamlessly signing in most of your returning users, or creating a new account with one tap!