From iOS 13.5, your iPhone and iPad will take a mouth mask into account. This is how this smarter form of facial recognition works.
Face ID with mouth mask works slightly differently
With more people than ever wearing face masks, the Face ID camera of the iPhone and iPad is suddenly having a hard time recognizing people. When making a face scan, the camera looks at the entire face, which is now almost half covered. This causes errors and frustration for users.
That is why Apple has made a special adjustment from iOS 13.5 (the update that appeared this week). Face ID now sees when people wear a face mask, but does not unlock your device yet. Making Face ID work with only half a scan of someone’s face suddenly makes the technology a lot less secure. For that reason, the camera sees when you wear a mouth mask, but your device remains locked.
Yet your iPhone or iPad does something different with that information. As soon as Face ID sees that you are wearing a mouth mask or other form of face cover, you can immediately enter your number code to unlock the device. Normally, Face ID will try to scan your face again a few times and you will have to wait until you can enter this login code.
This way you can unlock your device faster even if your face is partially covered. Entering a numeric code manually is still not ideal, but until Apple incorporates a fingerprint scanner into the screen of the iPhone, this seems to be the best interim solution.
Install iOS 13.5
To make this new Face ID for mouth masks work, you must first install iOS 13.5. The update is now available for all devices that also support iOS 13. In addition to this adjustment for Face ID, the update adds the corona API from Apple and Google, which you can learn all about in the article below.