Believe it or not it's actually nineteen times, not nine. Though the last ten introduce a fair amount of inconvenience and eww-factor when unlocking your phone.

I don't know about Apple phones, but I had luck getting my phone to unlock by using my chin. It wasn't really reliable (stopped working after a few hours, probably because of the beard growing), but I'm sure we can figure something out.

Being male, I actually have 21 digits, if you can stomach more inconvenience and eww-factor when unlocking a phone.

I tried using TouchID with my toes and it didn't really work.

> Nine times, for most people.

It's not too difficult to get access to the full 50000-odd combinations (see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204587 for where that number comes from) Apple hardware can identify with a little work.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/30/hacker-fa...

You can only try a few before the phone locks itself, I believe.

The idea was to be able to use more than your own 10 fingers for locking/unlocking as the owner. Not to brute-force TouchID as a thief.