How to Easily Turn Off Face ID on Your iPhone

Total time: 2 minutes

Updated: November 19th, 2020

For many, the Face ID feature made turning their iPhones on and off much easier. It also allowed purchases to be made on the iPhone and even allowed a user to sign in to many online accounts.

But there are a whole range of reasons that others might not want Face ID to be active on their iPhones or prefer that Face ID only be active for certain things like account sign-ins:

Security (particularly for use with Apple Pay)
Face ID doesn't work properly
The Face ID feature activates too quickly on sign-in (a very common complaint).

Whatever the reason, here are the steps to either completely turn off Face ID on your iPhone or customize how it's used.

iPhone

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Find your Settings app on your iPhone and select it.

Scroll down your settings to find Face ID & Passcode. Select it.

Enter your 4-digit passcode that you use to alternatively unlock your iPhone. (You'll be using this again once you deactivate Face ID.)

Here you can select and deselect whether you want to use Face ID for:

iPhone Unlock (to unlock your iPhone from its unlock screen)
iTunes & App Store (for any purchases in iTunes or Apple App Store)
Apple Pay (if you have Apple Pay set up, you can use Face ID to pay for certain items)
Password Autofill (Face ID will be used to verify your identity to autofill passwords at various websites)

Choose which options you want to use Face ID and which you'd like to turn off.