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OnePlus might face a lawsuit over its face unlock feature
August 11, 2025
TheOnePlus 5Trepresents the company’s first smartphone to feature face unlock functionality, and in our review of the phone, we found that functionality to have worked extremely well. Unfortunately forOnePlus, its face unlock feature might have landed the company in legal hot water.
Speaking withMySmartPrice, SensibleVision co-founder and CEO George Brostoff claims that OnePlus infringed on at least one of his company’s existing patents. SensibleVision specializes in facial recognition and biometric authentication technology. Thankfully, the company does not appear to be a patent troll — its facial recognition technology is expected to debut in Android smartphones by the end of 2018.
According to Brostoff, OnePlus might have infringed on SensibleVision’s existing illumination patent.Android Centrallooked into the patent in question, which deals with using the display as a source of illumination for the camera:
Remember that the OnePlus 5T does not use any special hardware for its face unlock feature — it’s literally the front-facing camera and software trickery. Because of that, the OnePlus 5Tmight haveinfringed on SensibleVision’s patent, since the phone uses a camera for biometric authentication and its display as a light source.
Brostoff used a few qualifiers in his sit-down withMySmartPrice, though he remarks that OnePlus’ face unlock implementation is “nothing new”:
Brostoff’s language implies that SensibleVision has yet to take any legal action against OnePlus. Even so, the illumination patent sounds a bit too broad for it to hold up in a patent infringement case.
Speaking to a public policy researcher ,MySmartPricealso notes that patents are only valid in jurisdictions where they were granted. In other words, unless SensibleVision filed a patent application or was granted a patent for face recognition in China, there is no infringement, since the company is based in the US.
Even if it’s early days, we’ll keep a close eye on whether a lawsuit eventually manifests itself.
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