My own personal experience is that it works great as log as I'm not too hot. The moment my hands get a little sweaty, it just fails nonstop. The reader gets so confused that I can't even program a new fingerprint in this state. Unfortunately, this happens with some frequency for me.
A Polar poll shows 23% of respondents complain of "too many fails." (http://www.polarb.com/131862) and certainly that has been my experience. I wonder whether more people are not overtly complaining about it because users feel that they are "doing it wrong," not that the software might have been too fiddly for release.
Sure, that's one possibility, but I'm not sure I'd take that poll's sample as being even remotely representative. At this point it's people on both sides pointing to weak evidence to support conclusisions they've already drawn.
To be clear, I have no dog in this fight, but I don't think that any information I have seen so far has a hope of being accurate.
The only dog I have in this fight is my iPhone 5S! My big question is whether the problem is hardware or software. The necessity to press the fingers just so and the UI validation giving, in effect, a false positive makes it seem like software. For Apple's sake I hope so. Software updates are a lot easier and cheaper than hardware recalls.
I've found this to be the case, often because Apple has branded itself so well with the "It just works" campaign, so when something doesn't work, many people assume they are what is broken, rather than the device.
Right. That's the point I was trying to make. Even if this little poll has a margin of error of 10% that still would leave more than 10% of people with a problem, but not talking about it yet.
Perhaps because it isn't erratic at all? My wife and I have not had the problem where it stops working after the first day - my anecdotal evidence beats theirs!
They even mention that there's a support post about this, but not a lot of people complaining about it.
I haven't any trouble with Touch ID, modulo when my fingers are wet or I do something dumb like use a part of my finger that I haven't scanned (like the first joint on my thumb).
That said, it takes way too long to work. I want it to be instantaneous and instead there's a noticeable delay in between when the screen flicks on and when I end up back on Springboard.
I've discovered that resting your thumb on the home button before waking your phone speeds up the process. When I do that I barely even see the lock screen. It's like the sensor eagerly scans upon contact.
Touch ID works great for me and seems like its getting faster. Sometimes I don't even get a chance to look at the lock screen before it unlocks. It's pretty awesome.
