Contradicting speculation that Apple had discovered a method to scan fingerprints that let them do away with a physical home button, well-connected KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says the iPhone 8 will feature a virtual home button that “won’t support fingerprint recognition,” Street Insider reports. Kuo claims “the full-screen design doesn’t work with existing capacitive fingerprint recognition, and the scan-through ability of the under-display fingerprint solution still has technical challenges,” leaving Apple to scrap fingerprint recognition on the device all together to avoid production delays.
Kuo adds that the iPhone 8 will support facial recognition with new 3D sensors, a claim boosted by a Bloomberg report that the new face scanner “allows users to log in, authenticate payments, and launch secure apps by scanning their face.”
According to people familiar with the product, Apple is also testing eye scanning to boost the system’s security capabilities. The sensor is said to be able to authenticate a user’s facial pattern and unlock the device in “a few hundred milliseconds,” and works even when flat on a table.
But those close to the testing said the feature is still very much in the test phase and may not actually appear in the iPhone 8, leaving the question for how the device will be unlocked if Apple misses its deadline an open question.
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