A recent report by Economic Daily News brought back rumours of an iPhone with under-display fingerprint technology.

Rumours of an iPhone with under-display fingerprint are not new. They’ve made the rounds before, but they’ve kind died out after more recent reports of what can be expected from this year’s iPhone.

While the report is in Chinese, I managed to translate it using our trusty web browser (Chrome). Of course, the translation is still all over the place but there are some things that can be taken out from it.

For one, the under-display ultrasonic fingerprint scanner is the work of multiple parties; touch panel maker GIS, OLED display makers BOE and Qualcomm.

The feature will reportedly be on at least one iPhone model that’ll release this year. That sort of lines up, since Apple is apparently releasing four models this year.

This also lines up with previous reports by renowned Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Barclays analyst, and Bloomberg, to name a few.

They’ve all reported that Apple may release an iPhone with both Face ID and under-display fingerprint technology in 2020 or 2021.

Despite that, many rumours and leaks have not really pointed out the existence of under-display fingerprint technology. This might imply that Apple pushed it to 2021, instead.

Currently, two types of under-display fingerprint sensors, optical and ultrasonic, are used in today’s smartphones.

Optical variants use light from smartphone displays to create a 2D fingerprint image. Ultrasonic variants, on the other hand, use high-frequency sound to generate a 3D fingerprint image.

Qualcomm already supplies some Samsung smartphones ultrasonic fingerprint sensors.

However, future iPhones may end up using an even more advanced version. By the time it releases, it could allow users to scan their fingerprint(s) across the entire display.