The discovery in December last year, of code in AOSP which would have supported a fingerprint sensor on the Nexus 6, saw many bemoan the missing component. In an interview with The Telegeraph, former Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside has confirmed the Nexus 6 was indeed supposed to carry one in the dimple on the rear, and spoke about why it wasn’t included.
Woodside, who is now the CEO of Dropbox, was quite frank about why the fingerprint reader wasn’t included, saying :
The secret behind that is that it was supposed to be fingerprint recognition, and Apple bought the best supplier. So the second best supplier was the only one available to everyone else in the industry and they weren’t there yet,
It’s also interesting to point out that he goes on to say that it “wouldn’t have made that big a difference”.
The removal of code for fingerprint support was quite late stage, indicating that it will very likely make an appearance in the next version of Android: Android M, which we should start learning about at Google I/O this year. With more than a year to refine the technology, it should be quite refined by the time Google does show off their fingerprint reading software and integration.
