The first phone with a fingerprint reader was the Pantech GI100 from 2004. It had a reader at the center of its D-Pad, one of those early implementations that required you to swipe your finger across them. This was a flip phone so the distinction between front and back is a bit iffy, but we’re calling this one front-mounted (based on when the phone is flipped open).
A few fingerprint readers appeared here and there over the years, but they were extremely rare – never exceeding 4 phones per year. It wasn’t until 2013 that biometric security became important in the public’s…