NEW DELHI: The demand for adding fingerprint sensors to smartphones has been ever-increasing and keeping up with the trend, fingerprint scanner-capable smartphone shipments are estimated to cross a billion units in 2018.

Samsung was the market leader in fingerprint-enabled smartphones — contributing 12% market share, followed by Apple and Huawei with 11% and 8% share, respectively, in the second quarter of 2017, market research firm Counterpoint Research said on Friday.

The fingerprint feature is likely to become the standard choice for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to provide authentication access, driven by a rapid rise in services like digital payments and mobile banking.