Posted by John Zoeller – Developer Relations Engineer, Loyrn Hairston – Product Marketing Manager, and Jonathan Salamon – Dashlane Staff Software Engineer
Dashlane is a password management and provision tool that provides a secure way to manage user credentials, access control, and authentication across multiple systems and applications.
Dashlane has over 18 million users and 20,000 businesses in 180 countries. It’s available on Android, Wear OS, iOS, macOS, Windows, and as a web app with an extension for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari.
Recently, they expanded their offerings by creating a Wear OS app with a Credential Provider integration from the Credential Manager API, bringing passkeys to their clients and users on smartwatches.
Streamlining Authentication on Wear OS
Dashlane users have frequently requested a Wear OS solution that provides standalone authentication for their favorite apps. In the past, Wear OS lacked the key APIs necessary for this request, which kept Dashlane from being able to provide the functionality. In their words:
“Our biggest challenge was the lack of a standard credentials API on Wear OS, which meant that it was impossible to bring our core features to this platform.”
This has changed with the introduction of the new Credential Manager API on Wear OS.
Credential Manager provides a simplified, standardized user sign-in experience with built-in authentication options for passkeys, passwords, and federated identities like Sign in with Google. Conveniently, it can be implemented with minimal effort by reusing the same code as the mobile version.
The Dashlane team was thrilled to learn about this, as it meant they could save a lot of time and effort: “[The] CredentialManager API provides the same API on phones and Wear OS; you write the code only once to support multiple form factors.”
After Dashlane had planned out their roadmap, they were able execute their vision for the new app with only a small engineering investment, reusing 92% of the Credential Manager code from their mobile app. And because the developers built Dashlane’s app UI with Jetpack Compose for Wear OS, 60% of their UI code was also reused.
Developing for Wear OS
To provide credentials to other apps with Credential Manager, Dashlane needed to implement the Credential Provider interface on Wear OS. This proved to be a simple exercise in calling their existing mobile code, where Dashlane had already implemented behavior for credential querying and credential selection.
For example, Dashlane was able to reuse their logic to handle client invocations of CredentialManager.getCredential. When a client invokes this, the Android framework propagates the client’s getCredentialRequest to Dashlane’s CredentialProviderService.onBeginGetCredentialRequest implementation to retrieve the credentials specified in the request.
Dashlane delegates the logic for onBeginGetCredentialRequest to their handleGetCredentials function, below, which is shared between their mobile and Wear OS implementations.
// When a Credential Manager client calls 'getCredential', the Android // framework invokes `onBeginGetCredentialRequest`. Dashlane // implemented this `handleGetCredentials` function to handle some of // the logic needed for `onBeginGetCredentialRequest` override fun handleGetCredentials( context: Context, request: BeginGetCredentialRequest): List<CredentialEntry> = request.beginGetCredentialOptions.flatMap { option -> when (option) { // Handle passkey credential is BeginGetPublicKeyCredentialOption -> { val passkeyRequestOptions = Gson().fromJson( option.requestJson, PasskeyRequestOptions::class.java) credentialLoader.loadPasskeyCredentials( passkeyRequestOptions.rpId, passkeyRequestOptions.allowCredentials ?: listOf() ).map { passkey -> val passkeyDisplayName = getSuggestionTitle(passkey, context) PublicKeyCredentialEntry.Builder( context, passkeyDisplayName, pendingIntentForGet(context, passkey.id), option ) .setLastUsedTime(passkey.locallyViewedDate) .setIcon(buildMicroLogomarkIcon(context = context)) .setDisplayName(passkeyDisplayName) .build() // Handle other credential types
Reusing precise logic flows like this made it a breeze for Dashlane to implement their Wear OS app.
“The Credential Manager API is unified across phones and Wear OS, which was a huge advantage. It meant we only had to write our code once.”
Impact and Improved Growth
The team is excited to be among the first credential providers on wearables: “Being one of the first on Wear OS was a key differentiator for us. It reinforces our brand as an innovator, focusing on the user experience, better meeting and serving our users where they are.”
As an early adopter of this new technology, Dashlanes Wear OS app has already shown early promise, as described by Dashlane software engineer, Sebastien Eggenspieler: “In the first 3 months, our Wear OS app organically grew to represent 1% of our active device install base.”
With their new experience launched, Wear OS apps can now rely on Dashlane as a trusted credential provider for their own Credential Manager integrations, using Dashlane to allow users to log in with a single tap; and users can view details about their credentials right from their wrist.
Dashlane’s Recommendations to Wear OS Developers
With their implementation complete, the Dashlane team can offer some advice for other developers who are considering the Credential Manager API. Their message is clear: “the future is passwordless… and passkeys are leading the way, [so] provide a passkey option.”
As a true innovator in their field, and the preferred credential provider for so many users, we are thrilled to have Dashlane support Credential Manager. They truly inspired us with their commitment to providing Wear OS users with the best experience possible:
“We hope that in the future every app developer will migrate their existing users to the Credential Manager API.”
Get Started with Credential Manager
With its elegant simplicity and built-in secure authentication methods, the Credential Manager API provides a simple, straightforward authentication experience for users that changes the game in Wear OS.
Want to find out more about how Dashlane is driving the future of end-user authentication? Check out our video blog with their team in Paris, and read about how they found a 70% in sign-in conversion rates with passkeys.
To learn more about how you can implement Credential Manager, read our official developer and UX guides, and be sure to check out our brand new blog post and video blog as part of Wear OS Spotlight week!
We’ve also expanded our existing Credential Manager sample to support Wear OS, to help guide you along the way, and if you’d like to provide credentials like Dashlane, you can use our Credential Provider sample.
Finally, explore how you can start developing additional experiences for Wear OS today with our documentation and samples.
