Samsung’s Galaxy S5 fingerprint scanner will be accessible by developers

Samsung’s Galaxy S5 includes a fingerprint scanner embedded in the home button, and that hardware will be made available to third-party devs, the company announced today at a developer-focused event during MWC this year. That move is in stark contrast to Apple’s strategy with its own fingerprint sensor tech, which is specifically off-limits to third-party devs. Apple went to great lengths to emphasize just how segmented its fingerprint scanner was from the rest of the hardware, and how isolated (read: protected from hackers) the data that it gathered was. Fingerprint information collected by the iPhone 5s scanner hardware built into Apple’s home button is held on a ‘secure enclave’ within the A7 system-on-a-chip, and communicated to other services only as an encrypted alias that conveys no sensitive data.