14 DAY TRIAL // The Touch ID fingerprint sensor on the new iPhone 5s is designed to recognize up to five different fingers – either all yours, or from five different people/users – but two clever brothers have come up with a trick that fools the sensor to recognize way more prints.
The Touch ID management module has a maximum of five usable slots, each designed to recognize and store (locally) one unique fingerprint.
But as Note Suwanchote and his brother reveal in the footage embedded below, Touch ID can be tricked into recognizing way more prints. All you need to do, apparently, is to swap prints constantly during the setup process, until you’re finally there.
This way the phone is forced into remembering far more patterns for a single print setup, and the process can then be repeated four more times (using various other fingerprints) for the four remaining slots.
Editor’s note While the trick certainly deserves coverage, there’s a potential downside to using it. I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure that this little gimmick can affect the reliability of your Touch ID sensor (not permanently, but still).
Here’s my theory. The initial setup process – where the phone asks you to rest your finger repeatedly on the Home button – basically increments the last of each scan, trying to get a complete, final (and most importantly accurate) image of your fingerprint.
By giving it way more different patterns for what the phone thinks is a single fingerprint, the sensor may end up with a crippled image of your thumb, or your index finger, for example.
My winning advice is to use Touch ID the way it was meant to be used – five prints tops. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t test the trick once or twice for fun.
