I’ve moved from the Google Pixel 4A, which had an excellent fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone, to the 7A.
I won’t sugarcoat it: in my experience the fingerprint sensor, now an optical sensor on the front of the phone, is near useless. It fails to read my finger/thumb print basically ~95% of the time, which means it can’t be used for any account that may lock the user out following ‘x’ unsuccessful login attempts.
I really don’t get why they shipped the feature with the phone given how unacceptably bad it is to use.
Is this a common opinion shared amongst 7A users? Is there something wrong with my phone, or am I missing something? I’d welcome any advice, as I would quite like to get this working reliably.
It works flawlessly for me while I struggled with the 4A fingerprint sensor. With the 4A I could get it to unlock roughly 25% of the time. The 7A doesn’t work as well for my wife.
I have a theory of why it works so well for me. How oily/ wet are you fingers normally? Can you open a dog poop bag easily? My fingers are very dry and I can’t open a dog poop bag without licking my fingers. My wife can open them no problem at all.
I have to lick my fingers to open those bags (unfortunately - it’s gross 😅) so my current theory is because I have dry hands maybe that’s making it more difficult for the sensor to pick up the prints.
Hmm that’s odd. That’s kind of the opposite of what I believed. My fingers are oily and can operate the sensor great. I even saw a website suggesting that if you have trouble with the sensor, to run your finger on the outside of your nose to get it oily to activate the sensor.
I’ve had the opposite experience too! I have dry fingers and my experience has been that the fingerprint sensor on the regular Pixel 7 rarely works. Incidentally, I also have trouble opening dog poop bags.
I miss the face unlock on the Pixel 4.