Announcing Android support of digital credentials

In today's interconnected world, managing digital identity is essential. Android aims to support open standards that ensure seamless interoperability with various identity providers and services. As part of this goal, we are excited to announce that Android, via Credential Manager's DigitalCredential API, now natively supports OpenID4VP and OpenID4VCI for digital credential presentation and issuance respectively. What are digital credentials? Digital credentials are cryptographically verifiable documents. The most common emerging use case for digital credentials is identity documents such as driver's licenses, passports, or national ID cards. In the coming years, it is anticipated that Android developers will develop innovative applications of this technology for a wider range of personal credentials that users will need to present digitally, including education certifications, insurance policies, memberships, permits, and more. Digital credentials can be provided by any installed Android app. These apps are known as "credential holders"; typically digital wallet apps such as Google Wallet or Samsung Wallet. Other apps not necessarily thought of as "wallets" may also have a use for exposing a digital credential. For example an airline app might want to offer their users' air miles reward program membership as a digital credential to be presented to other apps or websites. Digital credentials can be presented by the user to any other app or website on the same device, and Android also supports securely presenting Digital Credentials between devices using the same industry standard protocols used by passkeys (CTAP), by establishing encrypted communication tunnels. Users can store multiple credentials across multiple apps on their device. By leveraging OpenID4VP requests from websites using the W3C Digital Credential API, or from native apps using Android Credential Manager API, a user can select what credential to present from across all available credentials across all installed digital wallet apps. How digital credentials work Presentation To present the credential, the verifier sends an OpenID4VP request to the Digital Credential API, which then prompts the user to select a credential across all the credentials that can satisfy this request. Note that the user is selecting a credential, not a digital wallet app: