Apple never intended to implement the Touch ID scanner anywhere on the iPhone X, according to a company executive.

Apple's iPhone X is now on the market, albeit in small numbers due to the earlier manufacturing bottleneck. Prior to launch, however, there was a veritable tidal wave of rumours and leaks about the phone and its feature set, and before that a pretty long trail of rumours going back roughly a year or more.

A considerable chunk of those rumours, however, revolved around the subject of the Touch ID fingerprint scanner. It went first one way, then the other, then round again - would the iPhone X (or the iPhone 8, as it was then known) have a fingerprint scanner on the front, side, or back? Would a front-mounted scanner be embedded under the display? Would a side-mounted scanner be embedded in a power key? We saw every possibility suggested, even promoted, at one point or another.

Part of this was due to the ongoing rumours that both Apple and Samsung had been repeatedly trying - and failing- to implement some under-glass scanning technology. The market was already moving towards big 18:9 aspect ratio edge-to-edge displays with no bezel, and the theory was everyone wanted to figure out a way of freeing up the frontage for it. With fingerprint scanners now being a standard on flagships (and in the case of the iPhone, an integral part of the experience), OEMs had two options; make it work under the screen, or move it somewhere else.

In the end, what we got aboard the iPhone X was a full-front display and no Touch ID at all; not under the display, not on the side, not on the back. Analysts and pundits concluded that Apple must have been unable to implement it satisfactorily and ended up ditching it, relying instead only on the Face ID scanner for biometrics.

That's all now being put to rest, however, with a comment made by Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, Dan Riccio, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Riccio revealed that the rumours were not true. He said that it was decided very early in the iPhone X development that Touch ID would be dropped and Face ID would take over. He added that this was because the early prototypes for Face ID worked so well, and that Apple's dev team decided trying to squeeze Touch ID in as well would be a pointless distraction. Instead, the team focused all its energy on streamlining the best possible Face ID functionality.

"I heard some rumor [that] we couldn’t get Touch ID to work through the glass so we had to remove that," Riccio said, "When we hit early line of sight on getting Face ID to be [as] good as it was, we knew that if we could be successful we could enable the product that we wanted to go off and do and if that’s true it could be something that we could burn the bridges and be all in with."

"This is assuming it was a better solution."

"And that’s what we did. So we spent no time looking at fingerprints on the back or through the glass or on the side because if we did those things, which would be a last-minute change, they would be a distraction relative to enabling the more important thing that we were trying to achieve, which was Face ID done in a high-quality way."