Android mobile driver’s licenses? It’s complicated.

At least in the United States, the mobile driver’s license world is fragmented.

Because driver’s license issuance in the U.S. is a state and not a federal responsibility, each state has to develop its own mobile driver’s license implementation. Subject to federal and international standards, of course.

To date there have been two parties helping the states with this:

• mDL vendors such as Envoc and IDEMIA, who work with the states to create mDLs.
• Operating system vendors such as Apple and Google, who work with the states to incorporate mDLs in smartphone wallets.

But because the Android ecosystem is more fragmented than the iOS ecosystem, we now have a third party that is involved in mDLs. In addition to mDL vendors and operating system vendors, we also have really large smartphone providers.

Enter Samsung:

Samsung Electronics America today announced it is bringing mobile driver’s licenses and state IDs to Samsung Wallet. Arizona and Iowa will be the first states to offer a mobile version of its driver’s license to their residents. The update expands the Samsung Wallet experience by adding a convenient and secure way to use state-issued IDs and driver’s licenses

From https://news.samsung.com/us/samsung-idemia-bring-mobile-drivers-licenses-samsung-wallet-arizona-iowa-first-states-rollout/

(For those who have seen prior references to Samsung in the Bredemarket blog, rest assured that this information is public and Samsung won’t get harmed if you feed it to ChatGPT or Bard or whoever.)

In this particular case Samsung is working with IDEMIA (the mDL provider for Arizona and Iowa), but Samsung announced that it is working with other states and with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

While there are underlying standards (most notably ISO/IEC 18013-5, previously discussed here) that govern the implementation of mobile driver’s licenses, there is still a dizzying array of options.

On a personal note, I’m still working on validating my driver’s license for California’s pilot mDL program. It probably didn’t help that I renewed my physical driver’s license right in the middle of the mDL validation process.