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Someone Built a Face ID Unlock App for Mac Using an iPhone
Apple has spent nearly a decade fielding the same question from Mac owners: where is Face ID? The iPhone got it in 2017, the iPad followed soon after, and yet every MacBook and iMac sold since then has stuck with Touch ID or, on some models, no biometric login at all. Rumors about under-the-hood engineering work have surfaced periodically, but nothing has shipped. Now an independent developer has decided not to wait around for Cupertino and has built a working version himself.
The project is called FaceBridge, created by developer Wesley Favarin and released as open source software. Rather than trying to hack Apple’s internal Face ID hardware pipeline, which would require private APIs and would likely violate platform rules, Favarin took a different route. FaceBridge treats the iPhone as the biometric sensor and the Mac as the device requesting permission, borrowing conceptually from how Apple already lets an Apple Watch unlock a Mac or how iPhones approve certain account actions remotely.
Here is how it works in practice. When a user tries to trigger a protected action on the Mac, the Mac generates a signed authorization request and sends it to a paired iPhone over Bluetooth Low Energy or the local network. The iPhone checks that the request genuinely came from a trusted device, then prompts the user for Face ID approval through Apple’s standard LocalAuthentication framework. Once the person looks at their phone and Face ID succeeds, the iPhone signs its approval using keys generated and stored inside its Secure Enclave, the same isolated chip Apple uses to protect fingerprint and facial data on-device. That signed response travels back to the Mac, which verifies it and only then unlocks whatever action was gated behind it.
It is a clever workaround, and the security details suggest real engineering effort rather than a weekend hack. According to the project’s documentation, FaceBridge implements replay protection through cryptographic nonces and timestamp binding, so a captured approval message cannot simply be resent later to trick the system. Every request and response travels inside a signed envelope, each paired device gets its own persistent identity backed by Secure Enclave keys, and the whole pairing process resembles a trust ceremony rather than a simple Bluetooth handshake. Favarin has published the source code along with a technical write-up explaining the architecture, and he also posted about the project on Apple’s own developer forums, inviting feedback from other engineers on things like Secure Enclave identity lifecycle patterns and cross-device trust persistence.
It is important to be precise about what FaceBridge actually does, because the name invites some understandable confusion. This is not a way to unlock your Mac’s login screen with your face, and it will not replace macOS FileVault encryption, App Store purchase approvals, Safari’s saved password prompts, or Apple Pay. Favarin’s own documentation is explicit on this point: FaceBridge operates entirely at the application layer and does not intercept or replace any native system dialog. What it currently supports are three demonstration actions built into the app itself, things like revealing a protected content panel or running a predefined command, all gated behind the Face ID approval flow described above. Think of it less as system-level Face ID and more as a proof of concept for delegated biometric authorization between two Apple devices using nothing but publicly documented tools.
That distinction matters because it explains why this is possible at all. Apple has never allowed third-party developers to plug into the actual Face ID unlock chain for macOS, and there is no public API that lets an app authenticate a Mac login using an iPhone’s TrueDepth camera. FaceBridge does not break that wall. Instead it builds its own parallel authorization system next to it, using CryptoKit for the cryptography, CoreBluetooth and Network framework for the device-to-device communication, and standard LocalAuthentication calls on the iPhone side. The project currently carries a v0.3.0-alpha label, has been tested on real Mac and iPhone hardware rather than just simulators, and ships with a sizable automated test suite covering the cryptographic and protocol layers. Favarin is upfront that it has not been through any third-party security audit and is not intended for production use, financial transactions, or anything safety critical.
The bigger story here is less about this one app and more about what it signals. Mac owners have wanted proper Face ID for years, and Apple’s own supply chain has periodically hinted that it is coming, most recently through reports about an ultra-thin Face ID module reportedly being developed for future Mac hardware. But independent developers are no longer content to simply wait for Apple’s roadmap to catch up with expectations. Projects like FaceBridge show that a surprising amount of biometric-adjacent functionality can already be built using only the public frameworks Apple ships to every registered developer, no jailbreaking or private API access required. It is a pattern that has shown up elsewhere in the Apple ecosystem too, from third-party apps that already let a paired iPhone unlock a Mac via Touch ID-style triggers to tools that stitch together Continuity features Apple never explicitly designed to work that way.
For everyday users, FaceBridge in its current form is really a developer curiosity rather than a practical replacement for your login password. Building and running it requires Xcode, a recent macOS and iOS setup, and comfort compiling Swift packages, which puts it well outside what a typical Mac owner would install today. But for the community of engineers who work with Apple’s security frameworks, it is a genuinely interesting reference implementation, and the source code is available on GitHub for anyone who wants to study the pairing protocol or extend it further.
Whether Apple eventually ships native Face ID on the Mac remains an open question, and recent reporting suggests it is still not imminent, tied up in the physical challenge of fitting depth-sensing hardware into a laptop lid or a thin display bezel. In the meantime, projects like this one are a reminder that determined developers rarely wait for permission. If you want to dig into how it all fits together, the full FaceBridge project is documented on GitHub, and Favarin’s original post explaining the architecture is up on Apple’s Developer Forums for anyone curious about the technical reasoning behind it.
