I recently bought the iPad Air after having the iPad Pro and hating Face ID on it. It's bad enough that I have Face ID on my iPhone. I hate it so much.
Face ID is such a terrible UX that has caused me to enter my passcode to unlock more times a day than I care to count. Even if you ignore the fact that they don't work with masks, it's still a bad idea.
The false negative rate is incredibly high and a certain number of failures will trigger a passcode requirement and there's nothing you can do about that. That threshold is set by Apple.
Just give me Touch ID. I don't care that the false positive rate is too high (in your opinion, Apple; this was a state reason to get rid of it).
Another UX problem: when I had a home button I could exit the app by testing it. Now I have to swipe up. But which way I swipe depends on how the app is rotated. I could bring up my list of apps with a double tap of the home button. Now I have to do a weird swipe up-right-up to get the same functionality.
Asia has been familiar with the limitations of Face ID since it debuted, COVID just brought it to the West.
It's common (as everyone is now well aware) to wear a face mask when sniffly or coughing, but also, many in Asia wear a face mask when driving a moped, to try and filter out some of the pollution.
I get the vague impression that Apple is moving toward having both a thumbprint reader and Face ID, which I would welcome. It annoys me that it's taken them so long to roll out the iOS update which will let my Watch unlock my phone, that by the time I get it I probably won't be required to wear a mask in public anymore.
I love the move to Face ID (pre-covid). I would accept Touch ID as a back up, but never as my primary.
> Another UX problem: when I had a home button I could exit the app by testing it. Now I have to swipe up. But which way I swipe depends on how the app is rotated.
It's always swipe up relative to the bottom of the app. That makes sense.
> I could bring up my list of apps with a double tap of the home button. Now I have to do a weird swipe up-right-up to get the same functionality.
This is incorrect. You need only swipe up 20% of the screen or so. You should feel haptic feedback. No right motion needed.
And if you want to swipe directly to previous apps, simply swipe left or right on the bottom bar.
That is strange. I don’t remember FaceID failing for me without a mask on. Do you have any ideas on why it doesn’t work for you? FaceID is frictionless now. At first I missed not having to look at the phone to unlock it, but when compared to using our iPad with touchID it’s much easier.
Same here, I was really getting sick of re-training the damn thing every time the seasons changed. Drier air and colder? TouchID drops to maybe 10% success. Humid and warm again? Same. Took a shower or thoroughly washed your hands in the last 30 minutes? Or were swimming recently? TouchID doesn't work at all. Warmed your hands in front of a heater for a minute? TouchID's dead for a while. Ugh.
Masks are a problem with FaceID, of course, but otherwise it's a huge improvement, in my experience. I gather some people didn't have the trouble I did with Touch ID, so maybe for them FaceID is worse.
That's quite strange. My understanding was that most fingerprint readers were constantly updating their image of the fingerprint. For example shortly after enrolling my finger or after doing some manual work that made my hands feel raw it was noticeably less accurate to recognized my finger on the Pixel 4a. However I could quickly lock+unlock my phone with different areas of my finger and then it worked reliably.
I recently bought the iPad Air after having the iPad Pro and hating Face ID on it. It's bad enough that I have Face ID on my iPhone. I hate it so much.
Face ID is such a terrible UX that has caused me to enter my passcode to unlock more times a day than I care to count. Even if you ignore the fact that they don't work with masks, it's still a bad idea.
The false negative rate is incredibly high and a certain number of failures will trigger a passcode requirement and there's nothing you can do about that. That threshold is set by Apple.
Just give me Touch ID. I don't care that the false positive rate is too high (in your opinion, Apple; this was a state reason to get rid of it).
Another UX problem: when I had a home button I could exit the app by testing it. Now I have to swipe up. But which way I swipe depends on how the app is rotated. I could bring up my list of apps with a double tap of the home button. Now I have to do a weird swipe up-right-up to get the same functionality.
Just die, Face ID.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/
[2]: https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/specs/