“When Apple announced the iPhone X last week, the most sophisticated (and widely predicted) feature revealed was the facial recognition approach, called Face ID,” Evan Schuman writes for Computerworld. “But by choosing to go all or nothing with the iPhone X — it’s only Face ID, with no support for Touch ID — the big risk for Apple was that all the companies that support Touch ID in their apps wouldn’t quickly make the move to Face ID. So Apple made the decision for them.”
“If Amazon, Chase, Fidelity or any of the other major companies whose apps use Touch ID as a way to log in without a password had failed to make the move to Face ID, their customers would have been forced to go back to typing in long passwords. Apple, ever mindful of customer experience, chose to not permit that to happen,” Schuman writes. “To make sure that companies use Face ID in their apps, Apple simply didn’t give them any practical choice.”
“‘They have released the dev kit to the world, and it works exactly like Touch ID, from a development point of view,’ said Michael Fey, lead iOS developer for 1Password. The API for Touch ID ‘is the exact same API for how Face ID works,'” Schuman writes. “Steve Schult, senior director of product at LastPass, agreed. “Face ID will work right out of the box,” Shult said. “If we did nothing, the user will be able to use Face ID on our app.'”
“If Face ID proves to have real problems in the field — problems that Apple can’t quickly fix with a software patch — then partners would have justification in exploring authentication alternatives. Still, asking the likes of Chase or Amazon to create their own biometric approach is asking quite a lot,” Schuman writes. “If that happens, Apple will be in a world of hurt, since its high-priced iPhone X units have no hardware means of going back to Touch ID. This would be far more painful than the dreadful problems early in the Apple Maps rollout.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We expect that Apple’s attention to detail – Face ID demos and Apple TV remotes notwithstanding – virtually guarantees that they are damn sure the Face ID hardware is good to go before they begin shipping millions upon millions of iPhone X units.