ISSUE 68 • ANDROID ADVISOR 9and only the LG G8 with its time-of-flight sensor has
something similar. That means after more than two
years there’s finally an Android Phone that can rival
Apple’s TrueDepth camera and Face ID, an overdue
milestone that will hopefully spur other phone
makers to follow suit.
And it works really well. While Face unlock on the
Pixel 4 XL requires more precise positioning than
Face ID on the iPhone 11, for a first-gen feature, I
was impressed. It works on the first try better than
95 percent of the time, and it offers some subtle
improvements over Apple’s method. For one, there’s a
small bit of haptic feedback to let you know it works,
so you can stop holding your phone up. And there’s an
option to let you skip right to the home screen once it
recognizes your face, saving a swipe and making the
whole system feel far quicker and more integrated.
However, there’s a big caveat to Face unlock: it’s
less secure than Apple’s Face ID, at least for now.
That’s because Face unlock doesn’t track your eyes, so
someone could conceivably hold your Pixel 4 XL up
to your face while you’re sleeping and unlock it. That’s
not as big of a vulnerability as a third-party screen
protector giving you access to the Galaxy S10, but it
should raise some eyebrows.
Granted, this probably won’t be a concern for
most people, but as the phone’s only biometric-based
unlocking method, one would think Google would
have made it as foolproof as possible. As it stands,
Google has issued a vague promise to update it ‘in the
coming months’. Attention awareness is something
Face ID had from day one, and in an age of privacy