iPhone 8 Facial Recognition Could Fix The Notification Frustration

Those of you who have been following iPhone 8 rumors will know that the device is said to offer facial recognition features. This, potentially, offers a couple of benefits: it allows users to keep their phone more secure and it allows Apple to remove Touch ID entirely, paving the way for a larger display. Today we're learning of a third benefit that this facial recognition feature may offer, and though it's a small one, it sounds pretty awesome.

According to Guilherme Rambo on Twitter, Apple may use the iPhone's facial recognition feature to automatically silence notifications. Rambo found references to a "TLAttentionAwarenessObserver" class lurking within HomePod's firmware. The existence of this suggests that the iPhone will use facial recognition to silence incoming notifications when it detects the user is looking at the screen.

If that's what this is, then it'll certainly be a nice feature to have. It isn't the most groundbreaking feature, but if you're already looking at your display, you'll see the notification automatically pop up anyway, making the notification sound redundant and (possibly) annoying. Essentially, it's a quality-of-life addition brought on by a technology intended to do other things.

Obviously, the fact that this bit of code has been discovered doesn't mean that this feature will ever see the light of day. Even if this is a planned feature for the iPhone 8, it may not be present at launch. In other words: it's probably best to not expect any of these rumored features until Apple officially unveils the new iPhone and confirms what it can and can't do.

Thankfully for us, we likely don't have much longer to wait for that confirmation. Just yesterday, we heard that the iPhone 8 could begin production in mid-September, which means that it may actually be revealed alongside the iPhone 7s and 7s Plus. If Apple wants to stick with its traditional release schedule, we may see it holding a reveal event at the end of August of the beginning of September, so stay tuned for that.