Stop waiting for Apple to bring Touch ID back to the iPhone
I talk with a lot of people about their Apple products, and one thing that keeps coming up is that many people are waiting expectantly for Touch ID to make its triumphant return to the iPhone. Of course, the low end iPhone SE still has a Touch ID fingerprint sensor built into its Home button, but the main iPhone lines have eschewed Touch ID in favor of Face ID since 2017. Over the last couple of years there have been multiple rumors indicating that Apple may intend to bring Touch ID back to the iPhone.
Why would Apple want to bring Touch ID back? First of all, they’re not going to replace Face ID with Touch ID. Face ID has gotten fast, and it’s up to 20 times more secure than Touch ID. So it strikes me that if Apple were to release a future iPhone that had both Face ID and an under-glass Touch ID sensor, Touch ID would either be an alternative to setting up Face ID or be used in addition to facial recognition. This could serve as a type of two-factor authentication protocol.
Why did Apple get rid of Touch ID in the first place? Apple wanted the iPhone’s display to stretch from corner-to-corner. You can’t do that without eliminating the Home button. Thus, Touch ID went away and Face ID came on to the scene.
Why hasn’t Touch ID come back yet? We have to consider the possibility that Apple has no interest in bringing Touch ID back. As I mentioned before, Face ID is actually significantly more secure than Touch ID. It’s much more difficult to get a false-positive with facial recognition than it is with fingerprint recognition. But let’s assume Apple does intend to bring Touch ID back. My guess is that they’ve had difficulty making the under-glass Touch ID sensor completely disappear. Some Android phones have various sensors under the glass, but it’s often really easy to slightly turn the phone in such a way that you can see the sensor. Apple probably wants to avoid something like that if it can.
Stop waiting on Touch ID to buy a new iPhone. I worked in Apple Retail during the first few years of the iPhone. It may be hard to remember this now, but for the first four years of the iPhone’s existence it was limited to a single cellular carrier in the U.S.: Cingular/AT&T. I had a lot of customers who were holding out until the iPhone came to Verizon. As with Touch ID rumors now, every year there were rumors that this would be the year that the iPhone came to Verizon. Of course, the iPhone did eventually come to Verizon, but those super loyal Verizon holdouts went several years without the iPhone when it could have provided a lot of benefit to them. And indeed they wanted an iPhone!
It feels like we’re in a similar state today with Touch ID. Every year we get rumors that this will be the year that Touch ID returns, and every year people with aging iPhone 6, iPhone 7, or iPhone 8 models hold on to aging iPhones with rapidly decaying batteries saying, “I’ll wait one more year.”
Remember, just because a rumor makes a claim about a future Apple product, that doesn’t mean the rumor is based in fact. It’s possible that Touch ID will return to the flagship iPhone lines in 2022 or 2023, but we don’t know that Apple even intends to bring it back. How long can you wait?