Company official discusses the iPhone Face ID push

Sep 10, 2019 08:59 GMT  ·  By

Smartphone manufacturers are in a never-ending struggle to innovate and develop new features, but they sometime end up using each other’s idea as source of inspiration for improvements aimed at their own models.

One of the most recent such idea is a pop-up camera that would help reduce bezels on smartphones, while at the same time providing advanced photo capabilities, and Samsung and OnePlus are two of the names that have already expressed their interest in this approach.

But as far as Apple is concerned, that’s one direction that the company doesn’t want to follow, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Product Marketing, told Express.

“I would give people credit for trying new things, competition is what makes the world go round and makes us all better but that's not something we see coming anytime soon,” he said.

Face ID, a super-expensive feature

Instead, Apple will continue to push harder for improvements in a different area: biometrics. The Face ID system, which debuted on the iPhone X and will continue to remain available on the next-generation iPhones, won’t go anywhere anytime soon, with Joswiak confirming the company’s commitment to keeping this feature around.

“We'll continue to put it on more devices but also Touch ID will continue to have a role - it's a great technology on our iPad lineup and we don't see it going away anytime soon,” he said.

While this could suggest that Touch ID would return at some point on the iPhone, the Apple official was most likely referring to the iPad lineup, which still features a fingerprint sensor.

Speaking about why other phone makers are struggling to bring facial recognition systems to their devices, Joswiak said it’s all a matter of cost.

“This is a pretty costly system,” he said. “Our competitors think they can create something similar with a single camera and that’s often what they want to do. Unfortunately, there's a reason why this is costly; there's a reason why it has all these components because security is night and day over someone trying to do this off a 2D image.”

Rumor has it that a future iPhone model would come with both Face ID and Touch ID, with the latter embedded into the screen, but a confirmation in this regard isn’t available just yet.