Touch ID is Great, has a Strong Future

It's easy to set up, works well, adds surprisingly little friction to day-to-day usage of the phone.

Like many people, I didn't use a passcode lock on my phone, because I make lots of quick uses of my phone every hour, and having to unlock it regularly added just enough friction that I found it irritating. Basically, I valued regular convenience over security in that case.

Touch ID solves that problem. It lets me have a passcode, lets me set the passcode to something longer that takes more effort to enter (because I'll be using it less), and secures my phone for everyday use while still allowing me to get in and out of my phone with almost no additional friction. I love it.

Yes, it is possible to get a copy of your fingerprint and, using a somewhat involved process, create a duplicate sufficiently good to fool the TouchID sensor. That doesn't bother me at all, for a few reasons:

It's way better than the completely unsecured approach most people use with iPhones.
A passcode also has security flaws, particularly if you must enter it frequently in public situations.
It basically requires someone to be very interested in getting into your phone, rather than simply casual opportunistic theft.

Sure, I'd love it if Apple had figured out some magical solution that made Touch ID completely impenetrable, but in the meantime, having an option that's lower friction than passcodes and higher security than no passcodes is working very well for me.

The Future of Touch ID

The most obvious future for TouchID is to expand its use to more devices, starting with the iPad. After that, the Mac line has some appeal, although without the home button as the primary entry point, finding the right way to integrate the Touch ID sensor with a Mac Book Pro, Mac Pro or iMac will have some challenges. I'd love to have Touch ID support on a wireless keyboard on the Mac Mini I have connected to my TV to run Plex.

There are also interesting possibilities in terms of new features that TouchID could enable. The most promising and interesting would be a mobile payment system. When I can pay for my lunch using my iPhone and Touch ID, Apple will have made real headway in payment systems.

Another interesting feature multi-user support for iOS. Full multi-user support (with applications and data on a per-user basis) is unlikely to come quickly, as it has lots of complex implications for an operating system that has avoided all of that complexity.

Still, if I could register my son's fingerprint for my phone and use that to supply custom restrictions about which applications he could access, that'd be great. And if applications within iOS could use an API to ask who unlocked the phone and use that internally, that has potential. It might require a permission to operate, but it could still be valuable. For instance, Plex could store information about who watched what content and where they were when they stopped watching a video. ("Plex would like to access current user, allow?")

Of course, my ideas for what Apple can do with Touch ID are purely speculation but I'm definitely interested to see where this goes.