5 ms·
More importantly, Android's pattern draw allows the user to pass on an already traced line. That way you can't guess the pattern just by looking at the screen s
by fbnlsr 7y ago
More importantly, Android's pattern draw allows the user to pass on an already traced line. That way you can't guess the pattern just by looking at the screen smudges.
- psychometry 7y agoSorry, I don't understand what you're trying to say. Why can't you guess the pattern by looking at the smudges?
- alasano 7y agoYou can pass over the same point more than once which would obfuscate the direction of the original passes on the smudge.
- q_eng_anon 7y agoquick somebody do the combinatorics on this
- psychometry 7y agoThe number of unique paths is theoretically infinite since the path could be infinitely long, but there's obviously some software limitation on that.
- ok_coo 7y agoBecause the pattern can go back over part of the screen that's already smudged.
- onion2k 7y agoA valid pattern on Android is to swipe the middle 3 dots backwards and forwards 3 times like left-middle-right-middle-left-middle-right. The smudge on the screen just shows it uses the middle three dots some number of times.
- moviuro 7y agoNot on Android 9 (tested on my Nokia 7 Plus). Once you pass on a dot, you can't get back to it. You also can't "jump over" dots (top left - top right is actually top left - top - top right).
- Karunamon 7y agoThey changed that at some point. Back in the KitKat days, I once pranked a friend by changing their pattern to the same pattern as before, but by skipping the middle dot (top left -> bottom right). If you did it fast enough, the gesture looked identical to the old pattern.