14 DAY TRIAL // The iPhone X is now official with facial recognition and no fingerprint sensors, as people familiar with the matter said Apple adopted the backup plan and abandoned Touch ID completely after months of struggle to find a new location for the fingerprint sensor.
An Apple executive, however, says all these reports were nothing but false, revealing that the company hasn’t even tried to find a new location for Touch ID because Face ID worked smoothly from the very beginning.
People with knowledge of the matter indicated earlier this year that Apple still wanted the iPhone X to feature Touch ID with a fingerprint sensor, but due to the bezel-less display, keeping the Home button around was no longer an option.
As a workaround, the company considered embedding the fingerprint reader in the display of the phone, but this project failed from its early versions. Then, Apple even looked into several other implementations, including a fingerprint sensor on the back of the iPhone X or even on the side, integrated into the power button, but none of them worked the way the company wanted.
It was Plan A from the very beginning
Going all-in on facial recognition was Apple’s plan B, the sources said, but according to one Apple official, this isn’t true. Facial recognition was plan A all the time and fingerprint sensors weren’t even considered.
"I heard some rumor [that] we couldn’t get Touch ID to work through the glass so we had to remove that. When we hit early line of sight on getting Face ID to be [as] good as it was, we knew that if we could be successful we could enable the product that we wanted to go off and do and if that’s true it could be something that we could burn the bridges and be all in with,” Dan Riccio, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, Apple, was quoted as saying.
“This is assuming it was a better solution. And that’s what we did. So we spent no time looking at fingerprints on the back or through the glass or on the side because if we did those things, which would be a last-minute change, they would be a distraction relative to enabling the more important thing that we were trying to achieve, which was Face ID done in a high-quality way.”
Of course, it’s pretty difficult to tell whoever is right here, but rumors pointing to the technical issues with implementing fingerprint sensors do seem to align with the iPhone X delay pretty well.