A lot of Pixel users love the Android 7.1 feature that lets them slide down the notification shade by swiping down on their fingerprint sensor. In fact, a lot of Nexus 6P and 5X users love the idea too — but the feature isn’t available on their devices, despite the fact that all the devices use the same fingerprint scanner hardware.
This caused enough frustration that Android Police sourced a comment on the issue from Ian Lake, a Developer Advocate at Google, who said that while the hardware might be the same, the older firmware doesn’t support any kind of gesture detection on the scanner (though some coders have created a clever solution by classifying the ‘Finger moved too fast’ status as a swipe).
The next question on everyone’s minds, of course, was whether Google might consider a firmware update to add the feature, and the answer, it turns out, is maybe. Google told Android Police that it was “evaluating” a firmware update to add support for the fingerprint scanner gesture feature on the Nexus 6P and 5X.
“Stay tuned,” the company added.
[source]Android Police 1, 2[/source]
