Oliver Haslam·

“They All Stink” Says Apple’s Phil Schiller About Android’s Face ID Competitors

Apple’s head of marketing Phil Schiller is still on the public relations trail, this time speaking with Dutch website Bright.nl.

During the interview, attention obviously turned to the iPhone X, with its brand new Face ID security feature also receiving some attention. As you might expect, Schiller was keen to make sure everyone is well aware of how impressive Face ID is and, importantly, that the competition cannot come close to it.

According to Schiller, Apple’s aim is to make security something we are all keen to do, which can only be a good thing in our eyes. However, when speaking about the competing facial recognition technologies used by Android smartphone makers, Schiller took the opportunity to stick the knife in, twist it, and then do it all over again. According to the man himself, “they all stink.”

They don’t work in all the ways we need Face ID to work. We’re very aware that through the years the simple thing, this Home button, that started as the way you click to get to the Home screen, grew into doing so many things for us. We added Touch ID, it took you to the multitasking screen, paged Siri, activated Apple Pay. All through this one mechanical button.

So for Face ID we needed the best way we know of to enable us to easily unlock our device with our face, in a protected way with the Secure Enclave, and support all these other things. We had to solve all of that. Other things that people have tried with face haven’t been anything like that. Face ID is a very unique implementation.

Schiller also took the chance to remind everyone that no developers have access to Face ID facial recognition data, just as they did not have access to fingerprints with Touch ID authentication. Developers do, of course, have access to facial mapping data for use with augmented reality applications, but Schiller pointed out that this is “different than Face ID.”

(Source: Bright.nl)

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