So Apple pushed out iOS 13.5 on Wednesday, and buried in the release notes next to the big COVID contact-tracing framework everyone's already written ten thousand words about is this tiny, almost embarrassing little fix: Face ID now knows when you're wearing a mask.
Not "knows" in some clever sensor way. It's dumber than that, and honestly better for it. If you've got a mask on, the phone gives up on Face ID way faster than before and just shoves the passcode field up at you. That's it. That's the whole feature. But if you've spent the last two months standing in the cereal aisle jabbing at your phone with a mask half fogging your glasses, muttering at it to just let you in already, you know exactly why this matters.
I tried it yesterday at the pharmacy on Grand Ave, the one that's been doing curbside since March. Old iOS: pull phone out, Face ID tries and fails, tries and fails again, sits there for what feels like four full seconds pretending it might work this time, then finally surrenders and asks for the passcode. New iOS: mask goes up, one swipe, passcode field is just there. It's maybe two seconds faster. Doesn't sound like much written down like that. Felt like a small miracle standing in a parking lot with my hands full of a prescription bag and a wallet.
I get why this wasn't in the original iPhone X launch materials back in 2017 — nobody designing Face ID in a lab in Cupertino was thinking "what if half the country has to cover their faces to buy groceries." Nobody could've planned for that. But it's a good reminder that a lot of "smart" design is really just fast iteration on stuff nobody predicted, and Apple actually turned this one around pretty quick considering masks have been a daily reality since basically April.
The bigger piece of iOS 13.5, the exposure notification API built with Google, is the actual headline everywhere else this week, and I'm not going to pretend I have some hot take nobody else has. Public health agencies get to build apps on top of it now instead of everyone rolling their own half-broken Bluetooth handshake system, which seems obviously good. I don't have strong feelings on it beyond that because I haven't seen a single app actually using it yet in my state. Ask me again in a month.
What I do have an opinion on: Face ID has been mediocre in low light since day one and this update doesn't touch that. I still take my glasses off half the time by accident when it fails at night and the phone tries again anyway instead of just admitting defeat like it does with masks now. If Apple can teach the thing to recognize "there's fabric covering the lower half of this face," surely "it's dark and this person is squinting" isn't that much harder. Feels like an easy follow-up update and I'd bet money it doesn't come for a while.
Also, minor thing, but Group FaceTime got a small tweak in this same update where it's supposed to auto-highlight whoever's talking more reliably. I've been doing a family call most Sunday nights since this whole thing started (my mom insists on it, we've missed exactly zero weeks) and I'll believe the improvement when I see it. Right now it still occasionally decides my brother's dog barking off-screen counts as "the active speaker" and blows his tile up to full size for no reason. Small bug, funny every time.
None of this is a huge story. Nobody's going to remember iOS 13.5 the way they'll remember whatever comes out of the actual contact-tracing apps once (if) they launch. But there's something I like about a fix this specific and this small getting shipped at all — it means somebody on that team was paying attention to an annoyance that, three months ago, straightforwardly did not exist as a problem to solve. Software usually lags behind the world. This time it kept up.
Update your phone if you haven't. Takes about ten minutes over wifi, and the passcode thing alone is worth it if you're still making mask-and-groceries runs like the rest of us.