Pin input improvement ideas

[lfq33dl5]

While pins on a Pixel device are actually secure enough in most cases thanks to the Titan chip, they could still be improved a ton.

• No animations. There is a couple of reasons I see why this could be useful.
  1. People not being able to see which buttons light up makes it harder for someone to get your pin. This can be important in some of the scenarios either I or people I know have been in. For example, one of the biggest universities in my country hands out phones to people who are able to log in. If you then remember someone's pin by looking over their should and the bid blue lights, you might be able to steal a phone and potentially everything on it easily that way.
  2. Less reason to get a privacy screen. While you mostly can prevent this from happening with a privacy screen already, these have their own problems. From the environmental cost (people ordering it from amazon for example) to the actual usability. Maybe you still want to be able to show memes on your phone to friends, without having to make sure that the phone is perfectly angled.
• Characters disappearing after first input. This should be self explanatory, but I'll add my ideas to why this is important as well.
  1. Without pin scrambling: An extension to no animations. This makes it even harder for someone to get your pin, especially if you input your pin fast and don't really let the person behind you take a look. While the patter of your finger can still give away parts of your pin, this makes it just a bit harder to see the numbers you're hitting and can potentially prevent pin spying.
  2. With pin scrambling, this becomes an even bigger benefit. While you can remember the layout within seconds, you are slow with the input. With this, you can remember the pin within just a couple of seconds and once you're prepared to input it, people that are not supposed to see your pin have a hard time following the pin.

To me, both of these Pin improvements still have the same benefit as regular pins (being easy to remember), while also being a much securer way to input them.

[matchboxbananasynergy]

This is now at least partly complete with the introduction of "Enhanced PIN privacy" upstream that hides animations. Unclear if the second suggestion is something that's wanted.

[thestinger]

The keypad animations are covered by that but not the dots showing entered characters.