Michal Ždanský When Apple in 2012 he bought it was clear that AuthenTec, a leading manufacturer of fingerprint recognition technology, had big plans for biometric readers. He revealed these a year later at a performance iPhone 5S, one of whose main innovations was Touch ID, a fingerprint reader built into the Home button.
At first it was just a convenient way to unlock your phone and confirm payments in the App Store, but the past year has shown that AuthenTec's technology is part of something much bigger.
Touch ID is the basic security component of the contactless payment service Apple Pay. Thanks to close integration, Apple has a ready-made system that no one can currently compete with, because parts of it are the result of long-term negotiations with banks, card companies and merchants themselves, and technologies that only Apple has available.
By purchasing AuthenTec, the company gained exclusive access to the best fingerprint readers on the market. In fact, AuthenTec was way ahead of its rivals at the time before the acquisition, where even the second best choice is not good enough for practical use in mobile devices.
They also experienced this firsthand at Motorola. Former executive director Dennis Woodside in a recent interview expressed, that the company planned to include a fingerprint reader on the Nexus 6 it was making for Google. It was Motorola that was one of the first to come up with this sensor for a mobile phone, namely the Atrix 4G model. At that time, they used a sensor from AuthenTec.
When this option was no longer available, as the company was bought by Apple, Motorola instead decided to drop the fingerprint reader. “The second best supplier was the only one available to all the manufacturers and it was way behind,” recalls Woodside. Rather than settle for a second-rate inaccurate sensor, they preferred to shelve the whole idea, leaving the Nexus 6 with only a tiny dent on the back of the phone where the reader should have belonged.
Despite this, other manufacturers, namely Samsung and HTC, have decided to include a reader in some of their devices. Samsung introduced it in its flagship Galaxy S5, while HTC used the reader in the One Max phone. User and reviewer experience has shown how the sensor from the second best vendor, Synaptics, looks like in practice – inaccurate fingerprint reading and awkward scanning emerged as the most common consequences of a second-rate sensor.
The $356 million investment it cost to acquire AuthenTec seems to have paid off big for Apple, more or less giving it a huge head start in biometric authentication that its competitors may not catch up to in a few years.
With that reader, Apple really nailed it, I agree with the article, I had the opportunity to test the reader at Samsung on their S5tc and I can say that it doesn't catch on Touch iD even by accident, and yet it's so simple, I'm surprised that the competition didn't solve it like this a long time ago and Apple had to show them again, the competition will come up with something, it's worth it. Well, then Apple will take it and perfect it, and I'll still manage to patent it :-D, the world is full of sikovnym :-)
Except that Apple didn't invent it, but bought the entire company AuthenTec, whose product it is :-) Which does not change the fact that TouchID is excellent and probably the only usable one.
what is simple the competition used it - as long as it was possible and Apple didn't buy the company... and the authenticator certainly already had it patented, and Apple just bought the company with the patents - what paid off for them
don't poop Apple just bought a company that had patents. Reading fingers has long been a fiction, including laptops, a lot of them were lucky to be able to squeeze it into the phone. if another company caught on, someone else would have the patents. but it's a good thing, especially when it comes to safety. For example, no manufacturer solved it with the droid because they only looked for the cores, which for me personally is a total bummer, even if I use a reader on my laptop. Of course, with payments, there is a completely different dimension, and I personally don't care if it asks for a pin when paying or if it requires a fingerprint, it takes approximately the same amount of time to make a purchase, and is it more convenient? I don't know, one has to take the phone out of one's pocket and confirm the payment.
Completely out of line, it can be seen that you do not understand at all how Touch ID works compared to your "quotation in laptops".
obviously you don't understand the written text, the point was that apple DID NOT INVENT ANYTHING, it just bought a company that has patents for it and implemented it in the phone. if someone overtook them, they would be out of luck. I'm not comparing technology at all, just that the idea is not new - whether it's in a laptop, on a phone or when entering a building.
Yes, Apple smartly bought AuthenTec. But any other corporation could have done that. And the idea is not new, it's like comparing an office copier scanner and CAD/CAM, Touch ID simply doesn't scan your fingerprint, but its sub-epidermal layer, and that's where it differs from others, either in terms of security or performance.
I use it every day on my iPhone 5S. It should work even better in the iPhone 6 (6 plus). They could also put it in macbooks and iMacs.
Yes, I have to say that the reader is even better in the 6 and 6plus from experience. And specifically when unlocking with a damp (wet) finger. It doesn't read it on the 5S, but it does on the 6 (although not always either).
me 6 sometimes doesn't feel a sweaty finger when running, or when the front of the phone fogs up during the cold-warm transition
I don't want to attack in the slightest, I'm happy for Lsa, I read it every day, but the level of articles here is really bad compared to, for example, abroad. And I write this only because this is finally a well-slept article. So it's actually all praise. Enjoy and thanks!
Well, before arguing with you here about whether this is a great move by Apple and the advantages of TouchID over other readers, I am a little scared that no one has addressed the security risk in this discussion... why voluntarily submit your fingerprints to a device that is defacto always online….hmmm…and I definitely wouldn’t accept the arguments that the fingerprint is stored in the chip and can’t get anywhere else (i.e. outside the phone) at all…nowadays, when any “secret and non-secret” services have access to any online device…. .how do you feel now, TouchID users….have you ever wondered what is really going on with that fingerprint ????
Putin keeps them in his closet! Hansi