MacBook Face ID with Glance: setup, security & what to expect

MacBook Face ID does not officially exist. Apple ships Touch ID on most Macs and Apple Watch auto-unlock as the two first-party ways to skip typing your password. Glance is a free, open-source third-party app that fills the gap using your FaceTime camera plus a small face-recognition model. This guide covers the five-minute setup, the three system permissions you will need to grant, and the security caveats every user should read before enrolling their face.

I spend most of my working day on a Mac managing client campaigns, writing content and running Meta Ads dashboards. Every focused session breaks the same way: lock the Mac, walk to the kitchen, come back, type the password again. Over a full day that pattern repeats forty or fifty times. Glance is the closest thing to iPhone-style Face ID that a MacBook can deliver right now, and this is the setup guide I wish I had when I first heard about it.

What is Glance and how does it differ from Apple's Face ID?

Glance is a macOS application written in Swift and SwiftUI. It runs a face-recognition model on the frames from your Mac's built-in camera, matches them against a template of your face that you enrol once, and types your Mac password on the lock screen when it finds a match. The full source code is on GitHub at github.com/jonnyoo/glance. The latest release as of this writing is v1.0.1, a 14 MB signed DMG.

Apple's Face ID on iPhone and iPad Pro is a completely different system. It uses a TrueDepth camera that projects roughly 30,000 invisible infrared dots onto your face and reads them back to build a real 3D depth map. That is why iPhone Face ID resists photos and even most videos. MacBooks do not have that hardware. The FaceTime camera is a normal 2D webcam. So any face-unlock app on macOS, Glance included, is working from a flat image, which is fundamentally less secure than the iPhone system. The developer is honest about this in the README, and I will come back to the security section below.

The upside is convenience. Once Glance is set up, waking your Mac and getting past the login screen becomes a one-second glance at the camera. No password typing. No Touch ID reach. No taking your Apple Watch off wrist mode. For anyone who unlocks their Mac dozens of times a day, that is meaningful.

Why bother? A freelancer productivity angle

I did a rough count on my own Mac before installing Glance. Between Slack notifications, WhatsApp Web pings, coffee refills and stepping out to take calls, I lock and unlock my Mac somewhere between forty and sixty times a workday. Each unlock takes about four seconds if I type the password, or two seconds using Touch ID with my hand near the keyboard. Total time: two to three minutes per day just typing the same password over and over.

Two minutes a day is nothing on its own. But it adds up to about ten hours of active password-typing per year for a heavy Mac user, and the real cost is not the seconds. It is the interruption cost. Every password prompt breaks whatever state I was in. Face unlock removes that friction. You look at the screen, it recognises you, you are back to whatever tab you were working in. This is the same reason iPhone users who upgrade to Face ID rarely go back to typing a passcode.

For someone whose workday runs through a browser, a code editor and a design tool, that friction removal changes the feel of the machine. It stops feeling like something you unlock and starts feeling like something that is always ready. That is why Apple ships Face ID on iPhone in the first place.

How to install Glance on your Mac in 5 minutes

The full install is under five minutes if you already have Touch ID enabled and know your Mac password. Here is the exact sequence.

Step 1: Download the Glance DMG from GitHub

Go to github.com/jonnyoo/glance/releases. Download the latest Glance.dmg file. Version 1.0.1 was published in September 2026 and weighs about 14 MB. GitHub serves the file directly, no login needed.

Step 2: Install the app in Applications

Double click the downloaded DMG. A Finder window opens showing the Glance icon and a shortcut to your Applications folder. Drag Glance onto the Applications shortcut. Wait a second for the copy to finish. Right click the mounted DMG in Finder and choose Eject. You can delete the DMG from Downloads at this point.

Step 3: Open Glance and get past Gatekeeper

Launch Glance from your Applications folder or by pressing Command Space and typing Glance. On the first launch, macOS may refuse to open it because it is from an unidentified developer or is not notarised. If that happens, right click Glance in Finder and pick Open, then Open again in the follow-up dialogue. Alternatively, go to System Settings, Privacy and Security, and click Open Anyway next to the block message near the bottom of the pane.

Step 4: Grant Camera permission

Glance will request camera access on first launch. Approve the prompt. This is the only way the app can see your face. According to the README, frames are processed entirely in memory and never written to disk, so nothing is saved as an image file. You can double-check camera access anytime in System Settings, Privacy and Security, Camera.

Step 5: Grant Accessibility permission

Because macOS does not expose a public API for third-party apps to unlock the login screen, Glance types your password on your behalf. To do that it needs Accessibility permission. When prompted, open System Settings, go to Privacy and Security, then Accessibility, and toggle Glance on. You will need to enter your Mac password to confirm the change. Without this permission Glance cannot unlock anything.

Step 6: Enrol your face and password (Touch ID gates it)

Follow the in-app enrolment wizard. You look straight at the camera, then slightly left, slightly right, slightly up and down. The whole thing takes about twenty seconds. Then you enter your Mac password once. Glance encrypts your face template and your password together and stores the key in the Secure Enclave, protected by Touch ID. That means if anyone steals your Mac, they cannot pull the password back out without your fingerprint. This detail is important. Do not skip enrolling Touch ID first if you have not already.

Step 7: Test the unlock and tweak the settings

Lock your Mac with Control Command Q. Wait a second, then look at the camera as if you were checking your notifications. Glance should recognise you within one to two seconds and type your password in. If it fails, you can always fall back to Touch ID or type the password manually. In Glance preferences you can tune sensitivity, adjust the recognition timeout, and choose whether Glance should also handle screensaver wake or only the full lock screen.

The three permissions macOS asks for, in plain English

Every permission Glance requests exists for a reason. Reading the trade-offs before you approve them is worth the sixty seconds.

Camera. Glance sees your face through the FaceTime camera. It has to, in order to recognise you. The README states frames stay in memory and never touch the disk. This is verifiable in the open source code. If you are still worried, you can toggle the camera permission off at any time from System Settings and Glance will refuse to work rather than fail silently.

Accessibility. Accessibility permissions on macOS let one app control another, including typing keystrokes. Malicious apps abuse this. Glance needs it for the mundane reason that it has to type your login password into the lock screen. This is the permission most worth being careful about across your whole system: audit which apps have it every few months in System Settings, Privacy and Security, Accessibility. Revoke anything you do not recognise.

Touch ID. Touch ID is not really a permission, it is the encryption gate. Glance uses your fingerprint to encrypt and decrypt the stored password and face template. If your Mac lacks Touch ID, Glance either will not work or will run in a less secure mode where the password is stored under your Mac account key alone. If you own a MacBook Pro or Air with the Touch ID key or an external Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, you are covered.

The security reality check the README asks you to read

The Glance README opens with a line that most tool authors would bury: "Glance is not as secure as Apple's Face ID or Touch ID." This is honest and worth restating. A 2D webcam cannot build a depth map. So Glance's liveness detection, which tries to tell a real face from a spoof, is doing pattern-matching on pixels rather than measuring physical depth.

The developer's own summary of what Glance can and cannot defeat, paraphrased from the README: it does defeat a printed photo of you. It does defeat a photo held up on a phone screen. It does not reliably defeat a video of you. Meaning if someone had a short video of your face on their phone and pointed it at your Mac's camera in front of your locked screen, they could probably get in. That risk exists.

The right way to think about Glance is the same way you think about the passcode on a hotel-room safe. It stops opportunistic access. It does not stop a motivated attacker with prep time. For a Mac that lives on your home desk in a solo-office setting, or a freelancer's laptop that only ever sits inside your studio, that is a fine tradeoff. For a Mac you use in a shared office, a co-working space, or an airport lounge, the risk profile shifts and you should think harder before relying on face unlock alone. Keep the auto-lock timer short. Keep the full password requirement after every reboot. Do not turn Glance into a substitute for common sense.

What Glance can and cannot do

What it does well. It unlocks a locked Mac in under two seconds when you look at the camera. It works consistently across every Mac with a FaceTime camera. It is free and open source, which means the community can audit the code and you never have to trust a subscription vendor with your face template. It gates the sensitive data with Touch ID, so an attacker with physical access to a powered-off Mac cannot extract your password without your fingerprint.

What it cannot do. It cannot unlock apps that need biometric confirmation, like 1Password, banking apps or App Store purchases. Those still require Touch ID directly. It cannot cover the first login after a reboot. macOS requires a full password there for FileVault to work, and Glance cannot bypass that requirement even if it wanted to. It also will not work in the dark. If you routinely use your Mac in a dim room, you will fall back to Touch ID at night.

Alternatives worth knowing about

Apple Watch auto-unlock. Apple's own solution. If you already wear an Apple Watch, this is nearly friction-free: your Mac unlocks when the Watch is on your wrist and near the machine. Costs zero if you own the Watch already. Downside: it needs the Watch on your wrist, so if you take it off to charge or sleep, you are back to typing.

Touch ID keyboard. Apple sells a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID for around ₹15,000 to ₹20,000 in India. If you use an external monitor and keyboard setup with a MacBook lid closed, this is the cleanest first-party answer. Downside: the price, and the fact that your hand still has to reach a specific key.

Third-party face-unlock apps. A handful of paid Mac utilities bundle webcam face unlock alongside broader features like clipboard managers and window layout tools. Glance is the free, single-purpose alternative to those. If you want one purpose-built tool without paying, Glance is the obvious pick.

Practical tips from setting it up

A few small things I would do differently if I were starting the setup fresh. Enrol your face in the exact lighting you actually use most of the time. If your desk faces a window in daylight, enrol at your desk with that light. If you also work at night, run the enrolment a second time in evening light so Glance has samples from both conditions. Recognition accuracy jumps noticeably.

Keep your auto-lock timer at five minutes or less even after Glance is working. The whole point of face unlock is to make locking feel effortless, so there is no cost to a shorter timer. And run the initial permission approvals in one sitting so you are not repeatedly prompted mid-work.

If you use an external webcam through a stand or arm, test that Glance can see you from that camera. macOS may default to the built-in FaceTime camera for security-related tasks. This is fine, and usually preferable, since the built-in camera is a known component that cannot be swapped out easily by an attacker.

Frequently asked questions

Does the MacBook have Face ID like the iPhone?

No. As of 2026, no MacBook ships with Apple's official Face ID. iPhones and iPads Pro use a TrueDepth camera that projects thousands of invisible infrared dots to build a 3D depth map of your face. MacBook FaceTime cameras are ordinary 2D webcams, so they cannot run Apple's Face ID system. Apple offers Touch ID on most Macs and Apple Watch auto-unlock as the two first-party alternatives. Third-party apps like Glance approximate a Face ID experience using the standard webcam and a lightweight face-recognition model, but they are not the same product Apple ships on iPhone.

Is Glance safe to install on my Mac?

Glance is open source on GitHub at github.com/jonnyoo/glance, and the README is unusually honest about its limitations. Face frames are processed in memory and never written to disk. Your enrolled face template and password are encrypted and gated by Touch ID, so a thief who steals your Mac cannot extract the password without your fingerprint. That said, the developer explicitly writes that Glance is not as secure as Apple's Face ID, because a 2D webcam cannot reliably tell a face from a high-quality video. Treat Glance as a convenience feature, not a security upgrade.

Can Glance be fooled by a printed photo?

The Glance README states that its liveness detection defeats printed photos and phone-screen photos, but does not reliably defeat videos of the user. If you keep your Mac in a bag around strangers, this matters. If it lives on your desk at home or in a solo-office setting like most freelancers, the practical risk is low. The mitigation is simple: keep a shorter auto-lock timer, and always require a full password for the first unlock after a reboot. Do not disable those safeguards.

Which MacBook models does Glance work on?

Any Mac with a built-in FaceTime camera running a recent macOS version. That covers every MacBook Air and MacBook Pro from the last several years, plus iMacs and Studio Displays with cameras. Older Intel MacBooks may or may not work depending on the specific macOS release supported by the developer. Check the Glance releases page on GitHub for the current minimum macOS version before you download.

Is there a paid alternative to Glance for MacBook face unlock?

A few paid options exist. Some Mac utilities in the App Store offer webcam-based unlock as part of a larger feature bundle, and there have been paid apps historically that focused specifically on face unlock. For most users the free, open source Glance route makes more sense in 2026: no subscription, source code visible, and the developer is upfront about the tradeoffs. If you need enterprise-grade support and vendor accountability, Apple's own Touch ID plus Apple Watch auto-unlock combination is the safer answer.

Related guides

• How to Install Face ID on MacBook: 2026 Step-by-Step Guide: the tight, action-only tutorial version of this guide.
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Your next step

If you are still weighing whether to install Glance, my honest suggestion is: try it, keep your auto-lock timer short, and treat it as convenience rather than security. If you decide it is not for you, uninstalling is one drag to the Trash. And if the topic that brought you here is really about protecting a work machine that runs client data or campaigns, invest in the boring things too. Turn on FileVault. Use a password manager. Take backups. Those give you far more real safety than any unlock method.