Google wants to standardize digital car key and ID support on Android

Enlarge / The Android Ready SE logo. (credit: Google)

OK, it’s time to head out the door, so make sure you’ve got your phone, keys, and wallet.

That’s a lot of items to carry around, so what if you only had to bring your phone? After all, your keys and wallet are just legacy authentication devices. We could totally replace them with a phone! That’s the future Google is working toward as it pushes Android forward with support for driver’s licenses and digital car keys.

Google’s latest announcement details work to standardize an Android ecosystem around hardware and software, called the “Android Ready SE Alliance,” that will make all this work. “SE” here is “secure element,” a hardware component quarantined from the rest of the system, designed to only run secure computing tasks like an NFC payment. The idea is that phone manufacturers will be able to buy an “Android Ready SE” from secure element vendors like NXP, Thales, STMicroelectronics, Giesecke+Devrient, and Kigen, and Google says that these SE vendors are “joining hands with Google to create a set of open-source, validated, and ready-to-use SE Applets” that will support these emerging use cases.