Touch ID Trips & Tricks: Train Multiple Fingerprints at Once / Increase Reliability

Apple’s Touch ID is an excellent security convenience, allowing you to quickly unlock your iPhoneor iPad without having to type in your Passcode. Most of us will want to train at least the index finger and thumb of both hands in order to have some unlocking flexibility. That requires adding each fingerprint manually, and the iPhone only allows five total fingerprints to be trained. What if you want to train more than five fingers? Or what if you want to make the training process more efficient?

Train Multiple Fingers Simultaneously

 

It sounds crazy to us, too, and then we tried it. This method worked flawlessly for us here and many of our customers have also reported success. The process is simple:

1. On any Touch ID-capable iOS device, visit Settings > Touch ID & Passcode and enter your Passcode
2. Remove your existing fingerprints (if you like) by swiping right-to-left on the ones that exist.
3. Tap “Add a Fingerprint…“
4. Start cycling through your fingers. I did this with thumb, index and middle finger of my right hand first, in that order. One tap per finger. When the phone vibrates, skip to the next finger in sequence. When you finish with the middle finger, return to the thumb.
5. Use the middle/pad of each finger first (just as the iPhone instructs) and then when it tells you to start using the edges, do so until it tells you you’re finished. Ignore any messages about moving too much or too little between scans.
6. When finished you can leave the name alone or tap it to rename. Robin suggests “Right hand” and “Left hand”.

In the time it normally takes to train a single finger you’ve now tained three. This has worked with all existing versions of Touch ID sensors for everyone that has tested thus far. As is typical, the more you use it the more reliable it will get: Touch ID continually trains itself.

Increase Reliability 

Did you ever try to unlock your phone with Touch ID and have it fail repeatedly? 

Let's fix it!

 

The initial setup does a pretty good job of teaching Touch ID your fingerprint, but you can give it more training than just the initial recording at setup. This improves the accuracy and reliability.

 

Here's how:

 

On any Touch ID-capable iOS device, visit Settings > Touch ID & Passcode and enter your Passcode.

There's a hidden feature here. Touch the Home button gently like you're trying to unlock your phone. You should see the matching Finger 1-5 in the list flash. 

 

Do this several times for each finger. After each flash, move the finger slightly. Try training from the tip of your finger to the edges of where your finger touches the sensor when you hold the phone.

 

Touch ID allows you to store up to 5 fingerprints. If you only ever use one finger to unlock your device, you can also increase reliability by saving that one fingerprint as 5 individual fingerprints.

 

Use the comments below to let us know how this goes for you.