There’s been a ton of innovative and exciting mobile and desktop apps and tools that have managed to attract a lot of initial attention before falling into obscurity. Remember Knock? The app that allows you to unlock your Mac without inputting a password? Sure, it still has a fair amount of satisfied users, but the hype around it seems to have quickly dissipated into nothing. The same affliction doesn’t seem to be applied in equal measures to tweaks that are released into the jailbreak world, with hype already starting to build for BioUnlock, a tweak that hooks into the iPhone 5s Touch ID sensor to essentially offer the same functionality as Knock.
BioUnlock isn’t quite in a finished state at the time of writing and as such hasn’t managed to make it onto one of Cydia’s default repositories just yet. With that said, there is currently nothing that offers the exact same functionality available for jailbroken devices and therefore will definitely be one to keep an eye out for when it lands.
Eric Castro, the development mind behind BioUnlock, has uploaded a video to his YouTube channel that gives a brief overview of the package, and shows how effective and easy it will actually be to use for those who require this kind of functionality and purchase it when it’s live.
A small piece of software will need to be installed on the Mac(s), presumably offered as a free download, that will constantly run and monitor for signals from the iPhone. The BioUnlock tweak will then need to be purchased, downloaded and installed from Cydia that will be paired with the Mac in order to perform the unlocking mechanism on detection of a recognized biometric signature. The beauty of this package for me lies in the fact that Castro has had the foresight to allow different scanned fingerprints to be used for different unlocking, meaning that the iOS device itself will remain locked if required.
Castro has stated that he is expecting the tweak to be available by the beginning of next month after he has cleaned up some of the code and built a pairing system that makes things as easy as possible for the user.
There’s no mention of pricing for BioUnlock just yet, but this is definitely an exciting tweak that could act as a catalyst for developers to design and build powerful Touch ID based tweaks.
You may also like to check out:
- How To Use Touch ID Fingerprints As App Shortcuts On iPhone 5s
- How To Use iPhone 5s Touch ID For Password Autofills On Websites And Apps [VIDEO]
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