FaceID on the iPhone is cool and convenient to unlock your phone or for making payments at the counter. However, ever since the pandemic began and everyone had to wear a mask, it becomes somewhat useless most of the time as everyone needs to wear masks.
Times like these make you realise how good Apple’s previous TouchID was and wish that you have both (FaceID and TouchID) on the iPhone.
But thankfully, quite late but better than never, Apple is enabling FaceID unlock while you are wearing masks.
The new FaceID unlocking while wearing masks is on iOS 15.4 Beta 1 at the moment, so it’s not available for the whole masses just yet. But if you can get your hands on the iOS 15.4 Beta, this new feature can be set up under FaceID settings.
This means that you don’t need to open your mask anymore or enter the passcode when you have to unlock the phone or making payments at the supermarket with Apple Pay.
It looks like enabling the FaceID with a Mask feature will reduce the security a little bit as the sensor will only use your eyes and their surroundings to authenticate (rather than the whole facial contour and features).
As always, it’s always security vs convenience, so it’s entirely up to you whether you want to enable this new feature.
Other modern smartphones mostly offer two types of authentications on the device, or a fingerprint scanner on the display like the Google Pixel 6 Pro. It means that this is the problem that happens only for iPhone users who have only been relying on facial unlocking (FaceID) so far and it’s already been two years or so.
A little too late, but pretty sure a lot of iPhone owners would appreciate the much-needed update.
