Pixel 6 Face Unlock may arrive along with the next Feature Drop
Google's new Pixel 6 phones might be amongst the best Android smartphones around, but they are far from perfect. The Pro's screen has a flickering problem, which the company has said will be fixed in December. The phones don't charge as fast as the company had implied. The slow speed of the fingerprint scanner is being passed off as a feature, and we don't know if the other two problems affecting the in-display reader will be fixed. Thankfully, Google may be planning to introduce another option for biometrics.
Rumors had hinted that Pixel 6 would come with Face Unlock
Before the Pixel 6 series launched, rumors had said that the handsets, or at least the Pixel 6 Pro, would come with facial recognition. This was also supported by leaked marketing material and code snippets. XDA Developers contributor Freak07 has found out that the company still hasn't removed references to the Face Unlock feature, which implies Google may roll it out in the future.
On July 9th a change was commited to the pixel 6´s powerhal config file for "face unlock".
— Mile (@mile_freak07) November 10, 2021
Link here:https://t.co/umNwik3BHJ
Apparently google is calling the feature "Tuscany" in this commit.
There might still be hope the feature will surface in the next feature drop.
The feature is called Tuscany internally and it looks like Google is trying to make it more power-efficient, which may explain why it was supposedly pulled at the last minute.
The Pixel 6 doesn't have any specialized hardware for face unlocking, which suggests the feature will be dependent on the front camera. Until the start of the month, the Play Store listing for the Security Hub showed Face Unlock as an option for the Pixel 6 devices, but 9to5Google reports that the screenshots were updated on November 2 and face unlock is no longer being shown as an option.
Thus, the mere mention of the feature in a code repository doesn't guarantee that it will be shipped via an update, but we are keeping our fingers crossed.
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