In a few weeks, you'll be able to use Face ID to unlock your iPhone while wearing a face mask.
Face ID with a mask is now perfect (iOS 15.4)
The latest iOS 15 beta lets you train your phone to recognize you when half your face is covered by a mask. You no longer have to take down your mask and risk spreading your germs to unlock your phone in public, and you can authenticate with Apple Pay, so you can safely pay in the grocery store again. It took a while, but Apple appears to have made FaceID viable again.
“This will make our lives a lot easier; forget the hassle of taking off the mask or entering a 6-digit password to use our phone in public. It will speed up our phone usage in public and more importantly, it will limit our need to expose ourselves to the virus,” Aseem Kishore, founder of Help Desk Geek, told Lifewire via email.
We’re a few years into the pandemic, and Apple has only just managed to update Face ID to work with masks. The most likely explanation for this is that it’s hard to keep facial recognition secure enough with only the upper part of the face to work on. Apple takes security very seriously, and both Face ID and Touch ID are fantastic.
