macOS Sonoma TouchID switch user issue

Now we have Sonoma 14.1 and the problem persists.

Fast user switch with same touch-id finger set up won't work.

We have to use different fingers for different user accounts now (this seems to work).

Someone may wonder why someone would use multiple user accounts for itself. The answer is simple: an account for business and one for private stuff, for example. Before Sonoma we could simply switch the accounts with one finger (Touch-ID) because we set Touch-ID the same on both accounts. This is broken in Sonoma - we have to use the password for switching (this could be identical on both accounts) ... or we have to set different fingers (Touch-ID) for different user accounts.

HELLO APPLE - YOU BLEW IT AGAIN!

I have been able to fix that issue by turning off Touch ID for fast user switching. If somebody does not use fast user switching then:

System Settings > Touch ID & Password > Turn off "Use Touch ID for fast user switching"

I have just tested this. There does seem to be a bug, in that if a fingerprint it identified, it will log in to an account asssociated with it, even if it is not the one that shows in the login window. Weird.

I have a second admin account that is there just in case something happens with my regular account. It did not have a fingerprint enabled. I added the fingerprint of my index finger, and I was able to reproduce the problem.

A workaround is to use a different finger for different accounts. Of course, it is not perfect, as you have to consciously remember which finger to use every time you switch.

kaleidoscopic wrote:

I have 2 users on my iMac running macOS Sonoma. I am using both users with TouchID login.

When I switch from user A to user B from the upper right corner, it prompts me to unlock user B using TouchID. After placing my finger, it logs in back to user A.

The same occurs if I switch from user B to user A. It prompts me to unlock user A with TouchID. But then it logs in back to user B after placing my finger.

I end up typing the login password every time I switch users.

This is not the first report I have heard along these lines...

If deleting all finger prints and adding them back in,

Add or delete fingerprints on your Mac - Apple Support

no resolve—

To be proactive you can file a bug report /submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

It is quite obvious that you can define the same finger several times, but macOS does not recognize the finger as the same but creates different internal "fingerprints". So macOS presumably always makes decisions based on probabilities, as the same finger is sometimes placed on the sensor in one way and sometimes in another.

In this way, TouchID recognition and user account selection feels buggy, but macOS does what it needs to do internally. It's not so much a technical flaw as a usability/design change and flaw.

But as said earlier. It worked in the previous macOS version. I "told" macOS to switch to this user account, used a finger I had setup earlier and It worked. Now it’s less important what the user wants - the TouchID recognition decides, and this is ... not an improvement to put it mildly.

Same here ... it's a random error (sometimes it works like it should) but it occurs very often!

It's really a shame that such obvious stuff is not tested by Apple. It's getting worse and worse with quality control at Apple and it’s now a bad idea to use a new macOS major version right after release.

aklwb wrote:

There are 100 million Mac users in the world. This is the way all people access their machines. Who coded this. You think you would have got it right.

True, but I dare say less (much less?) than 0.1% of those users have more than one account for the same person. Not an excuse for Apple, they should fix it, but in the grand scheme of things it may not be that high of a priority.

Same here except mine works going from B to A but not A to B. I believe it is actually intermittent, it worked yesterday and just tried it again and it failed once going from B to A but then it worked. No longer works at all going from A to B. Definitely not a consistent bug.

There are 100 million Mac users in the world. This is the way all people access their machines. Who coded this. You think you would have got it right.

They won't use it either if it does not work!