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.
I’m using just the regular 7, but I had issues with mine to start too. I’m also using a glass protector. I found a post saying to enable screen protector mode. This is found in display settings, seen below.
Solved most of my issues with print detection immediately. My biggest gripe now is only being able to add 4 prints, which is just stupid to me.
Never knew about that setting, and immediately seems to have improved things for me. Hopefully that lasts. Thanks!
Idk about this phone specifically, but a common ducktape fix for shitty fingerprint sensors is to scan one finger onto multiple finger scan spots, even all 5 available. That should improve accuracy.
This fixed almost all of my issues on the p7. I scanned my thumb 3x. Usually works now.
This did the trick for me as well. Scanned each thumb twice. Now I rarely, if ever, run into an issue.
I have the exact same problem moving from the 3a to the 6a. Why did they do this? The back sensor was so good!!
Amen. #rip 3a, you were the best
Yeah, it sucks. Recently moved from a 5 to a 7a and it’s just terrible.
Maybe it will improve over time but chances are I’ll switch to another phone vefore that happens…
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.
