Next iPhone will have all-screen design, facial recognition tech, leaks suggest

Enlarge / A concept render of what an edge-to-edge iPhone 8 might look like. No space for a fingerprint sensor, thus the need for another type of biometric login... (credit: Veniamin Geskin)

A new phone icon, presumably of the D22 iPhone, discovered in the firmware.

The next iPhone will feature an all-screen bezel-less design and infrared facial recognition tech, according to two software developers who have delved into a pre-release version of the upcoming HomePod's firmware.

Whether intentionally or not, it seems Apple pushed out an early version of the HomePod's firmware. The HomePod will apparently run a version of iOS 11 when it's released this December, and thus the code contains mentions of other Apple devices that will also support iOS 11.

In this case, the HomePod firmware includes two new code names: D22 and PearlID, which developers Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo believe to be the code names for the next iPhone and the new facial recognition tech respectively. Additionally, the firmware contains dozens of strings and function names that are clearly connected to some kind of front-facing infrared face analysis tech: BKFaceDetectStateInfo, mouthFrown_L, com.apple.power.camera.frontInfrared.activeDuration, etc.

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