You'll soon use Face ID to sign in to Apple TV apps with tvOS 15

Face ID (Image credit: Rene Ritchie / iMore)

What you need to know

Apple's upcoming tvOS 15 release will allow developers to unlock their apps using Face ID and Touch ID.
People will use their iPhone to authenticate.

Apple is set to make it easier than ever for people to sign in to their apps on Apple TV with the news that tvOS will support Face ID when it arrives this fall.

Confirmed via a WWDC developer video, the feature will allow apps to trigger a Face ID authentication on a user's iPhone. The same goes for Touch ID as well and any device running iOS 15 or iPadOS 15 will be able to handle the authentication.

Apple will allow developers to implement the new Sign in with Apple Device option when building their tvOS apps, but that's the one problem here – developers must enable the feature for it to work. For those that don't, we'll have to deal with the more clunky option of entering our passwords or hoping auto-fill from an iPhone or iPad works instead.

Apple announced iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and tvOS 15 during its WWDC opening keynote on Monday and they're now in the hands of eager developers. A public beta program will go live next month, while the rest of the planet will get in on the act this fall.

The new updates will arrive around the time we get new iPhones, but that doesn't mean the iPhone 12 lineup isn't full of amazing devices. Check out the best iPhone 12 deals we've come across and see if you can bag yourself a bargain today.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.