Will facial recognition take over the fingerprint recognition in the Smartphone market?

There’s no denying that Apple brought facial recognition in the limelight with its iPhone X. And with all the hype it got and how aggressively the company is still marketing this feature, it’s very likely that Face ID feature is the next big thing in the Smartphone market. In fact, many companies are already adopting similar technologies, including Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo and Vivo.

A report from Counterfeit Technology Market Research predicts that by 2020 over one billion Smartphones will feature some form of facial unlock solution. Now, this doesn’t suggest that this feature would outdo fingerprint recognition, it does hint where we’re heading in this market.

My personal opinion: much like how Apple totally excluded the headphone jack, in the coming years, we can indeed see the company can totally eliminate the finger recognition technology.

It’s worth noting though that Apple isn’t the first company that has Smartphone with facial recognition. Samsung was on the scene way before. Although Samsung devices uses 2D recognition along with Iris scanner; on the other hand, Apple uses state-of-art 3D depth mapping technique. In the coming days, this technology would get much more efficient and cost-effective. While not entirely 2020, in the next decade we will see even rural consumers getting comfortable with facial recognition technology.