Back in 2019, the Pixel 4 debuted with a pretty elaborate face unlock system. For whatever reason, Google ended up rethink its approach to biometrics, and the 4a and 5 functioned with fingerprint sensors alone. The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro came out in late 2021 and still, there was no sign that face unlock was returning. Following the discovery of some evidence suggesting there still might be ongoing work towards updating these phones with full face unlock support, a new report offers an insider look at the plan.

Earlier this month, a Redditor setting up a Pixel 6 encountered a face unlock option, as reported by 9to5Google. The poster wrote that the face unlock choice appeared during the “Choose a screen lock” step of setting up the phone, which is when users choose alternate ways to unlock screens. The "Face" option showed up with choices to set a password, pattern or PIN. The Redditor wasn't prompted to actually put face unlock into action, and it didn't show up in settings later. Oddly, this happened in a stable Android release as well, not something like a 12L beta build.

9to5Google probed the OS and discovered that "face" has been buried inside a section of security-related code since 2021. For whatever reason, however, it only recently and randomly popped up as an option. While face unlocking appeared in some overseas marketing for the Pixel 6, it seemed on release that Google had thought the better of providing it.

Now the site's back with a new report that attempts to both fill us in with a little backstory, as well as offer support for the idea that face unlock will ultimately arrive via a future update. According to unnamed sources, face unlock was very much on the menu for the Pixel 6 Pro (though not the smaller Pixel 6), up until relatively close to its launch.

Although we aren't privy to the reasoning behind that change of heart, efforts to bring the feature to the phone are supposedly ongoing, and it could still arrive with Google's next quarterly update. While it's a little odd to think about a major feature like this arriving so far after a phone's initial launch, we'll take what we can get.