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Last year, when everyone started wearing skins, it became difficult to use Apple’s Face ID feature to unlock iPhones. The company made unlocking a bit faster by immediately opening the passcode screen when your iPhone detected that you were wearing a mask.
Now, it plans to let you unlock the phone with Face ID while wearing your skin, but you would need an Apple Watch. As Engadget pointed out, the new iOS 14.5 developer beta lets you do just that if you’re wearing an unlocked Apple Watch.
[Read: India’s new customs duties will make your next phone pricier]
Here’s how the feature would work – you’ll have to manually enable an option to unlock your iPhone with a less precise Face ID alongside your Apple Watch for authentication.
You will be notified on your watch every time you successfully unlock your iPhone, which can be really annoying if you frequently unlock it. I prefer to stick to access code punching when wearing a mask.
As my colleague Callum suggested, it would be nice if Apple got Touch ID back. The company included Touch ID under the power button on the iPad Air released last year. You could come up with a similar solution with the iPhone, or as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggested, you could feature your own under-display fingerprint scanner.
Right now, the new Face ID unlocking system is in testing, but trust us to write a guide in our Basics section when it’s available to everyone.
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Posted on Feb 2, 2021 at 05:44 UTC
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