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Comment by temuze | Hacker News Reader

Mostly, I hope they bring TouchID back, preferably via a scanner on the back of the phone.

Outside of providing a bigger screen, FaceID is strictly worse:

- When I pulled my old iPhone out of my pocket, I would have my finger on the scanner and it would be unlocked before it reached my face. With FaceID on the iPhone X, I have to wait a few seconds.

- If you wake up and you're squinting as you look at your phone, FaceID won't work

- If you're wearing a hat and sunglasses, FaceID might not work

- If you're doing something else but you want to unlock your phone on the side in preparation for your next task, you have to stop and look at the phone

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But if you're in a pool with your family and want to take a photo, TouchID isn't going to work. And if you've been running and sweating and want to unlock your phone, many times it won't work. And if you're riding your bike in the woods and want to unlock it - right, gloves...

You can take a photo without logging in just by swiping right

By swiping (to the) left.

Maybe you're doing those activities extremely often, but for me they're edge cases vs the amount of times FaceID doesnt work for me when I'm simply wearing sunglasses, or a hat, or just in odd lighting.

I have both a work issued iPhone, and a personal pixel with a fingerprint unlock. I cannot recall any time I had issues with the pixel over the last month, while I'm extremely annoyed just thinking of how many times FaceID either took multiple seconds or didnt work at all.

FaceID works a lot better with gloves on than TouchID did.

Yeah, and touch ID works better in basically every other circumstance.

My TouchID drops to like a 10% success rate if the humidity's much different from it was on whatever day I set it up. Or if I've done any work with my hands in the last week or so and roughed my fingers up a bit. Or if I've looked at water in the last hour. I've configured it several times and it never gets much better. I end up using the code most of the time. Probably need to just disable it, it fails so consistently that it'd be faster just to use the code every time.

That's on a 7+, though, and Macbook fingerprint sensors seem a little better (more like 50% success rate) so maybe it's just because it's an early version of the hardware.

I don’t have humidity problems but it’s a nuisance in the kitchen if I have a recipe up on the iPad. Whatever’s on my hands I have to wash off and then thoroughly dry. Depending on how messy my hands are, sometimes I’ll swipe sideways and type in the passcode with a clean knuckle.

If I didn’t need clean fingers to unlock TouchID to begin with, iPad OS’s new voice control accessibility feature would be great for in the kitchen. No need to touch the tablet at all any more.

> Or if I've done any work with my hands in the last week or so and roughed my fingers up a bit.

I register two fingers, one with "normal" hands, and one after a session of rock climbing.

True, but I don't see that as a real advantage. No matter how I unlock it, I need to take off my gloves to do anything with the phone, anyway.

There are gloves with conductive fingertips that can interact with the touchscreen, but they won't help you with a fingerprint scanner

Potentially something they're working on for 2021 https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/05/iphone-face-id-touch-id/

Sounds like you have the more secure mode active which requires attention to unlock. You can disable this so it doesn't care about attention.

Wow, I didn't know this! Thanks!

Touch ID and Face ID both have cases where they don’t work well (gloves/wet fingers, and sunglasses/squinting).

The thing I like better about Face ID is that it lets you hide the text of your notifications by default but then reveal it as soon as you look at the phone, which is nice for privacy.

I never enabled the setting to hide notification text in the past because it was too inconvenient before Face ID.

I believe Apple claims that FaceID is more secure? More data points = more entropy.

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