While some are hard at work trying to place fingerprint sensors underneath screens, it seems Apple will not be joining them — for now at least.
Apple of course, introduced its own face-scanning technology alongside the iPhone X called Face ID, which replaced the traditional fingerprint scanner.
And it seems the company is intending to stick with Face ID for a while longer. Noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted that Apple won’t be rushing to integrate under-screen fingerprint sensing for a while yet, 9to5Mac reports.
Kuo has provided a few different reasons for his prediction. First is the fact that, for most people, Face ID works pretty well. Anecdotally, the technology seems to work about as well as Touch ID — although both have their unique strengths and weaknesses.
Additionally, for now at least, in-display fingerprint sensors come with a number of constraints that apparently mean Apple is unwilling to consider them.
For one thing, they struggle to work with OLED screens (which Apple has moved towards as its display of choice for high-end devices), and for another they only work on a small portion of a phone’s screen.
Eventually, Kuo predicts that their adoption will really take off when you can place your finger anywhere on the screen and have it read your fingerprint, but that apparently won’t stop Samsung from equipping next year’s Samsung Galaxy S10 with a slightly restricted version of the technology.
As always, an analyst’s predictions should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt, but given Kuo’s past successful predictions we could see this one being correct.
