iPhone X Face ID Won’t Let You Share Your Smartphone

It’s very easy to give a significant other or a child access to your smartphone if you’re using a biometric security solution such as a fingerprint sensor. It’s possible to configure several fingerprints which can be used to unlock a shared device. Unfortunately, that won’t be possible with the iPhone X’s Face ID functionality. The new iPhone’s facial recognition technology won’t enable you to share your iPhone X.

Depending on how you use your iPhone, you might need to provide access to your device to a significant other or a child. If you own an iPhone with a fingerprint sensor, you can configure five different fingerprints. That’s not possible with the iPhone X.

The iPhone X doesn’t even have a fingerprint sensor so Touch ID is out of the equation. It has facial recognition that Apple calls Face ID. The caveat here is that Face ID only supports one registered face per device. You can’t configure multiple faces for facial recognition on the iPhone X.

So what do you do in a scenario where you need to give someone access to your locked device? Either you inconvenience them by making them come to you to scan your face every time they want to unlock the device or you need to configure a backup PIN that they can use to get into the iPhone X.

It remains to be seen if Apple will eventually increase the number of faces that can be recognized by the handset to provide access to the device.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: face id, iPhone X, Social Hit