iPhone Tips: Improving Touch ID accuracy

Since I was in a fingerprint scanning news mood, I thought it would be a good time to share this tip that I learned recently. Courtesy of iOS 7.1, you can now add additional training to your Touch ID settings in order to improve accuracy. In iOS 7.0.x, the only way to try and improve Touch ID was really to start over, and once it told you that the training was finished, you could opt to continue adding more scans of your finger. In 7.1, Apple made it fairly painless.

Here’s how it’s done. Open the Settings app on your iPhone 5S and go to the Touch ID & Passcode section. You will be prompted for your ‘character’ passcode, and then you will find the list of registered fingers under Fingerprints. Here’s the cool part! Simply place the finger you want to add scan training for (in the image, the “Right thumb”) on the phone’s Touch ID sensor/Home button and the iPhone will recognize which finger it is and add however many additional scans you want by lifting the finger off the sensor and then back on again. The screen will acknowledge the new scan by turning the selected finger gray for a couple of seconds and then fade back to white (see below).

So there you have it! Let us know if that helps improve your fingerprint recognition over on our Facebook page…and don’t forget to hit the Like button.