You don’t want to be without this feature on your iPhone, so read this story and see if the « fix » will work for you.
It’s a little ironic, don’t you think? Here I used my iPhone 15 Pro Max from June through September, running the iOS 26 beta with just one little issue. Well, okay, it might have been a larger issue. For about three days during the summer, my iPhone stopped ringing when it received an incoming call. A beta update appeared fairly quickly, and this issue was fixed. But here comes the so-called stable version of iOS 26 and all of a sudden, my Face ID just stopped working.
Another major bit of irony requires me to tell you that my wife, who currently sports an iPhone 16 Pro Max, doesn’t use Face ID preferring to punch in her passcode everytime she needs to verify her identity. Using her phone the other day, I was thinking about how useful Face ID is for iPhone users and I was thinking how I’d go crazy if I had to use my passcode instead of my face. Then my Face ID broke.
I shutdown my iPhone, restarted it, and the problem with Face ID remained. I also tried to reset Face ID. Before trying that, you have to disable the Stolen Device Protection feature by going to Privacy & Security > Stolen Device Protection and toggling the feature off. With this feature enabled, certain sensitive actions require the use of a biometric tool like Face ID or Touch ID.
