Prior to the iPhone X being announced, there was one consistent rumor and that is Apple would be getting rid of the home button once and for all. This led to many wondering about how Touch ID would work: would it be moved to the back like what we’ve seen with some Android phones, or would it be embedded into the display?The latter possibility was one of the more popular rumors floating around, but safe to say that Apple surprised many by eliminating Touch ID completely and replacing it with Face ID. As it turns out, this was pretty much Apple’s plan from the start, or at least that’s according to Dan Riccio, the SVP of Hardware Engineering at Apple who recently spoke to TechCrunch in an interview.
Riccio addressed the rumors that persisted in 2016 through 2017 regarding an embedded fingerprint sensor, in which he reiterated a claim from a report last month which claimed that Face ID replacing Touch ID was not a last minute option, “When we hit early line of sight on getting Face ID to be [as] good as it was, we knew that if we could be successful we could enable the product that we wanted to go off and do.”
He adds, “So we spent no time looking at fingerprints on the back or through the glass or on the side, because if we did those things — which would be a last-minute change — they would be a distraction relative to enabling the more important thing that we were trying to achieve — which was Face ID done in a high-quality way.”
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