Why we won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple(blog.anylist.com) |
Why we won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple(blog.anylist.com) |
Is this really true? I've had Apple IDs for pretty much as long as they've existed, but I've never had an iCloud email. Any email address can be an Apple ID.
(...in fact, early on, it didn't even have to be an email address. I still have one of those old-style Apple IDs.)
Password managers and 2FA options are getting popular in the mainstream media, and most people know about it after their financial service providers are mandating 2FA. It's probably time we figure out an easy way for users to sign in using a random alias of their email address to sign in to any service. Something that is generated using their real email address, the service provider's domain name and some kind of salting. This is the time the plain old username-password login came back.
Everything else applies to logging in with Facebook (or can be dealt with in other ways), which the company has supported for years and is now forced to remove it because of Apple’s restrictions. Without Sign In with Apple, I doubt if they would’ve chosen to remove the Facebook login anytime soon, thus putting more users into privacy hell holes despite making statements like this:
“At AnyList, we respect your privacy.
...
When you provide us with your email address, it is never sold, shared, or used to invade your privacy.”
If the documentation had been good enough, I’m sure they would’ve implemented it and also retained Facebook login for a longer time. Seeing Facebook login being removed gives me some comfort and a sense of “all’s well that ends well”.
For example you can goto dropbox on your pc/whatever and click signin with apple to see how it works.
Before Sign in with Apple, I uninstalled most apps that required me to sign up before I could even try them at all. Now I specifically look for apps that support it.
I don't want to give my email to 100 different companies (I get spam on the aliases that I did hand out long ago to apps that aren't even around anymore).
Though, all these hitherto obscure companies jumping into the spotlight just by setting themselves up as the underdog against the Apple world tree gives me an idea of what to do when I want a quick boost in popularity.. :)
This is ambiguous. "..to invade your privacy". They should have stopped at "sold, shared. The "to invade your privacy" is a bit doublespeak. One can say "we do not invade privacy, we merely inform of new products and services (aka marketing).
I know I am being pedantic, but hey.. it doesn't write "never" it writes "never for A".. we never wrote "never for B", so B is allowed by our T&C (which I haven't read so I may stand corrected).
I think they did not need to care about customer who did not check the reply email from support, because customer can also have multiple email and did not use their primary email to sign up to your service.
Yes, I know that there are ways to reduce this by scanning IPs and so on, but by using third party auth you offload that onto the auth providers.
1) Email/Password Sign In
2) Bite the bullet and add Apple / the "full auth stack" (FB/Google/etc.) & deal with account linking issues.
The device could be programmed to automatically generate new passwords/keys/whatever needed for remote authentication.
It would also have a 'disable' functionality that would render it useless if stolen.
(Perhaps this thing already exists. I am too lazy to google it as I type this :-)).
One way to sign in, used everywhere, decentralized, set up 2FA for everything in one place, switch providers with ease or be your own provider.
Apple could promote a decentralized solution instead of forcing the sign in with apple shit on people, but clearly they want all your data so they can lock you in.
I get the fact that login is broken across the web and there is no centralized login authority, but sorry Google/Facebook are not it imho.
We can/should look at other ways to authenticate, but thats a larger discussion.
I applaud Apple’s intentions but as this article proves, if the user isn’t driving the push to be more private then initiatives like Sign In With Apple cause little more than support headaches.
I liked the concept of Sign in with Apple when I first heard about it, but at this point it might be too confusing (I also never check my "main" Apple ID email).
The correct response to "Yo, they fucked up." is not "Oh screw it. We'll just do it ourselves."
EDIT: I really love the downvotes from developers that are perfectly aware this is how the things are.
And even for the "general user" I find the argument very weak, since it doesn't look as being any easier than using any other email relay, and there is a huge obvious conflict of interest for Apple here (they get data they may not have had otherwise PLUS have yet another tool to bind you to their services).
It reminds me of the days where everyone in the www was making OpenID providers but no one was actually willing to do an actual OpenID _consumer_. So that I could actually use _my_ identity provider on a server of _my_ choice instead of going through the hoops of yet another large company for no reason.
> if there are platforms where AnyList doesn’t support Sign in with Apple, like Android, and someone wants to log into their account, they’d have to know their privaterelay.appleid.com email address.
https://github.com/willowtreeapps/sign-in-with-apple-button-...
I’m an avid iOS user with a Windows desktop. I will never use “Sign-In with Apple” for this reason. It’s not useable unless you exclusively use Apple devices. Which I don’t.
I wish Apple communicated that better and/or developers better understood that Sign in with Apple really is a FB/Google/social login button like all of the others and should be supported everywhere, not just Apple devices.
(I'm in the iOS/Windows dual mode user team myself these days and find that I trust Sign-In with Apple, but I've definitely had to already email developers to request that they add the Sign-In with Apple button to websites and explain why they would/should.)
1) no PWA support for notifications
2) forcing stuff like this on everyone
I use a telegram chat bot. After signing up via the bot that sends you a link to set your password, you then also request a short expiry sign in link everytime you wish to sign in. The chatbot doubles as a notifications channel. I’m thinking of enhancing notifications do you can interact with them directly from the chatbot interface too.
The signin flow is great as it has 2fa built in by default.
Users have the option to provide their personal email address, but given the track record of these being sold it’s reasonable to expect users to not trust you.
You can email them correspondence because as above that goes to their primary email.
What you lose is the value of the email address as an asset.
Just give me sign in without involvement of a third party.
I dream of a world when I won’t have to type passwords on a phone anymore.
I’m talking about the most common happy path that they don’t want to optimize - the user registration/login
I hate typing a secure password on a phone and I want to evade this process whenever possible. Using Sign in with Apple you don’t have to type a thing and you confirm using FaceId.
It seems like the problems they were facing require different UX solutions than they already had or some bug reports to Apple (if the feature is really missing something).
For me it is much better to use Sign in with Apple as the user as the flow is simple, unified and Apple has a track record of caring about privacy, where it is often not the case for randomservice.io
well at least they are honest!
It’s not. It’s perfectly slick , simple and powerful and even non technical user can use. Please enable.
It's no worse a user experience than Sign in with Facebook or Sign in with Google, and in most ways it is the exact same user experience: click the button, get an Apple sign in prompt on Apple servers, sign in, get automatically redirected back to whatever app needed the sign in.
I’ve also never come across a “sign in with Apple” button on Windows. Not sure I’ve seen it on iOS either...
I understand after having read the explanation. However, my experience with chatbots is that they are unreliable, unhelpful and obnoxious, and I tend to go out of my way to avoid using them. I don't think a conversation is a right model for this. I also don't think it looks good when a website or app wants me to install a messaging app to create an account (though of course some people already use Telegram). It would have to be very enticing for me to overcome that friction.
The platform (Apple's, in this case) might be hostile to developers to some extent, but the whole web is hostile to users, in no small part thanks to websites slurping as much PI as possible and then leaking it one way or another. I get spam and phishing attempts every day, as do all of us, and I regularly see some of my burner emails show up on haveibeenpwned. Any service that helps me separate my accounts from me is some progress.
So there's nothing specifically against Apple, despite the title seeming to imply it -- just that they're taking the move right now because of Apple's new policy coming into effect.
I've got to say, I really wish there were a way to know whether I already used Facebook, Google, or Apple to log into a site or app before. My password manager is usually pretty good at letting me know if I've got a "normal" account with user/password, but it doesn't do anything to remind me if I ought to log in with one of the other services.
Every time I'm occasionally asked to sign into Spotify, Pinterest, Medium, Quora, etc. -- it's like, I'm pretty sure I've signed up with something before, but who even knows which one, or multiple?
If password managers could start saving that you've got accounts associated with Apple/Facebook/Google and highlight the relevant button on sign-in, it would be a big feature improvement.
No they don't. Other sign-on options don't obfuscate the email address.
They are likely removing FB login as otherwise their next app update will be rejected by Apple for supporting third party login but not Apple login.
> "That’s become even more true as time goes on, since Facebook constantly seems to be upping the ante with creepy privacy practices. We use the Facebook SDK to provide login functionality, and every new release of the SDK seems to add new tracking options that are turned on by default, which we have to take action to disable. Furthermore, the Facebook SDK has quality problems, and recently caused a huge number of iOS apps to crash due to a misconfigured server."
I don't share my "real" email address with Facebook.
My Google account isn't my main account, it's a throwaway I use for things that require email to sign up.
This is a general problem for all OAuth IdPs.
That's a pretty big argument specifically against Apple!
Username: Log in with FB
Password: <blank>
I've tried pinging the developers to support the idea directly, but I've been met with incomprehension.
Not sure if I'm explaining it wrong, or if it's way more work than I'm anticipating.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications&ref=setti...
Nope, some of them also apply to Facebook, and Facebook has the additional destruction of privacy concern. They have to remove Facebook or support Apple too because of the policy and have chose neither instead of both.
Some of their concerns specifically don’t apply to Facebook/Google/anything directly tied to your real email that you’d otherwise choose to sign up with. You add a bit of complexity to your database to record different login types, but you can easily reconcile them to an existing user if the emails match, and provide the features they want like searching for a user by email.
Next, if you don’t add a second-factor with to it, it becomes a ticking countdown until the account is compromised.
From the article...
> In addition to these customer experience problems that are common to all third-party login systems, Sign in with Apple introduces several more that are unique to it.
The one thing that is specifically against Apple is the new App Store policy that if an app uses google/Facebook sign in, the app _must_ also use Apple Sign In.
Doesn't it somewhat defeat the purpose of using a password manager if you use one account to sign into multiple sites?
Sign on services from main accounts seem like security flaws. If you use one main account resonsible for all your 'main things' to sign in to all the 'other things' that gives one vector of attack to enter or compromise 'all the things'.
Password managers exist to make the management of many things as easy as one thing, not to adapt to using one thing for everything, that's pretty much the opposite of what a password manager does.
Sign on services don't exist for convenience, despite being marketed that way, they exist to increase data collection abilities. Password managers exist to make using multiple accounts as easy as using a sign on service, that's the point. They should be separate from existing providers. They are an alternative to them.
Second, it often still takes a lot of work to create a new account on a site, even with a password manager. Selecting a username, discovering it's taken, selecting another one, generating a random password, pasting it into a second field to confirm the password, unchecking "send me updates", going to my email to find the confirm link, blah blah blah.
If I just want to do something quick on a site (like see a Quora answer or Medium post), it can be far easier to just click "log in with Google" and see the content in 5 seconds rather than 5 minutes while you wait for the damned account confirmation email.
Yes. Password managers exist to solve the problem of credential reuse; third-party login exists to implement credential reuse. They are fundamentally opposed.
"Another issue is Sign in with Apple’s “Hide My Email” feature. With this feature, if you create an account with us, Apple will generate a special email address just for that account. So rather than your email address being john.doe@icloud.com, we will see your email address as something like dpdcnf87nu@privaterelay.appleid.com. While this is an intriguing idea that provides a measure of privacy, in practice it creates numerous support and user experience headaches..."
Bookwalker (from Japan) draws a big red box around the login you used last on a given device. Presumably they store a cookie/sharedpreferences with it. It doesn't look pretty, but it helps.
1. Apple obfuscate email - this complicates the support system, and as per them Apple hadn't thought about it thoroughly. Collaboration is obstructed. Password recovery is not an easy process. 2. Cross Platform - The post states that Apple vaguely says that sign in on Android is possible, but doesn't state how it is to be done.
They do?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...
What about the argument that users check their gmail addresses regularly but rarely check their icloud email addresses?
You can. On each of the places you mention (Google and Facebook, certainly), somewhere in a settings page/window, you'll find your list of 'authorised apps'.
These will be a list the login systems to the third-party sites you've used to log in with.
You should then see a way to 'revoke' their access to your data.
When you log in for the first time it should request permission to "see your email address". Then you authenticate with your provider and get redirected back at which point the website should create an account for you on behalf of that email address. If next time you log in again via a complete different provider which has the same email address then it should just work. I mean that is the whole point of this...
Nope, not all their arguments. Only some.
I absolutely agree that password managers could remember this stuff. Single-signon is pretty easy to identify and you could setup the relationship.
You return to the site and if you have logged in with social media site before, and it detected you are still logged in, it will auto login for you.
That section of the post was surprising. If they're not supporting Sign in with Apple, then obviously they're going to remove support for all other third-party sign-ons, because those third-party sign-ons are what trigger the obligation to support Sign in with Apple.
Ending their post about "why we won't be supporting Sign in with Apple" with a note that they're also ending Sign in with Facebook on the merits of third-party sign-in is quite disingenuous. It doesn't matter at all what they think about the merits of Sign in with Facebook; those thoughts are completely irrelevant to their decision.
I also think it’s not as unmanageable as it seems.
Let’s analyze this quote, from the article, as it highlights what I imagine are a big crux of this issue:
> with the “Hide My Email” option, your spouse or friends obviously won’t know your privaterelay.appleid.com email address, so when they enter your email address, our systems will believe that you don’t have an account
Since you know this to be the case, why not have an onboard if flow they Sign In with Apple where you have them A) choose a visibility email used for sharing/communication etc. and B) allow for this email to be their backup email? So if they forget their login or whatever you could just transfer the account to this email instead? Of course this should be opt-in but you can always Under good faith explain benefits there in.
It’s more work, but I don’t believe that it’s going to run issue with Apple and provides end users with flexibility.
Of course this may not be worth it, at all. This is just a consideration worth thinking about as an app developer
edit: Of course another alternative here is they just make users aware of what their sharing email is and allow users to optionally change that, if they want to. This most definitely wouldn’t run counter to this I’d think
The easy answer is: they should just support "Sign in with Apple" on every platform. (That absolutely works. Sign in with Apple is a [mostly] standard OpenID Connect provider and has a web frontend that should work on every non-Apple platform just fine, just like FB/Google/etc.)
You wouldn't think to only support "Sign in with Google" only on Android devices? Maybe "Sign in with Facebook" should only apply to web browsers?
It's an interesting misconception or miscommunication that so many developers think "Sign in with Apple" should only show up on Apple devices.
Holy cow, how is this acceptable to any app developer or software company? This is reason enough for me to never use Apple/Facebook/Google sign-on as a developer -- huh, or even as a user. Apple/Facebook/Google could lock out all your users and literally destroy your business in a split second for an arbitrary policy violation, without explaining why, with no way to contact a human being. Haven't we seen enough HN headlines where an independent developer or a small software company is begging for help because <LargeCorporation> canceled their account or locked them out of something with no recourse?
EDIT: I know that AnyList is dependent on Apple's app store. This is still no reason to give Apple (or Google or Facebook) even more power over you.
Which is their right of course, but at the end of the day it means we get changes like these in the fine print. Gatekeepers like Apple and Google gain more control over what is allowed on their platforms, and subsequently what is allowed for the majority of the population to see.
I think Sign in with Apple is a great step forward even if all it does is eliminate apps that require Facebook and/or Google accounts to log in. I hate that - I actually ran into a feature on my mesh router system that required a FB/G login, which made it a useless feature for me. Fortunately I didn't need it..
It appears that the "account ID", "preferred contact method+address" and "authentication ID" are all the same here - which then creates the "account management code into a rat’s nest" scenario they describe in the post.
If an Account is, by design, it's own entity - you should be able to have 100 different authentication methods linked to that same account without impacting any other flow or part of the application.
Turn on and off authentication methods would also allow for seamless transition for users, without worrying about when one method is about to be killed.
Sign-in With Apple is perfect for those accounts that you basically never wanted to have anyway. If it’s something where I want a “real” login, especially one that I might want to share, then I’ll go through the trouble of actually registering and picking a shared secret that my wife and I know.
But for the average app that needs a way to keep a user profile for me, it’s just right, and from a UI perspective on iPhone it really is magic. Two taps and I’m just in with zero mental baggage and an email relay to eliminate the possibility of spam.
Ironically, this is also why I use Sign Up with Apple at every opportunity I can
This is by far the biggest selling point of Sign-In with Apple for me and I will continue to use it, and continue to not use apps that don't support it. I have plenty of e-mail aliases, but having an alias auto-generated for you is very convenient, and not having to generate a secure password is also very convenient.
The day AnyList gets hacked (not saying it will - but it's highly likely, the way security has taken a backseat due to "features") then at least my personal e-mail and password won't be there for every hacker on Earth to see and try to spam passwords to get into all of my other accounts.
To send emails to users with private email addresses, you must register your outbound emails or email domains and use Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to authenticate your outbound emails.
Otherwise the points the author makes seem painfully correct from our experience. Adding third-party sign-in immediately complicates the frontend as you need to support OAuth/OpenID-Connect workflows that are much more complicated than sending a password & e-mail combination (and possibly an OTP token) to a backend and reading the result. In addition, even though OAuth/OpenID-Connect are standardized it seems that almost every provider has decided to add its own quirks to it, so you can almost never just reuse the same code for integrating e.g. Github and Gitlab sign-ins.
What we currently do is to always add an e-mail using the third-party provider and use that to allow a password reset or password creation. You have to be quite careful with this as well though unless you want to open new security isues. Incorrectly implemented sign-in workflows via third-party providers can open avenues for account takeovers if you implement e-mail validation or account reconciliation incorrectly (e.g. an adversary might register an account with the victim's e-mail on a third-party platform and try to use that to sign into the victim's account; if the sign-in flow is configured incorrectly [happens a lot] the system will recognize the e-mail and sign the attacker into the victim's account).
Also, don't trust any validated information from third-party providers (especially e-mail addresses), as this can provide another attack vector. Always do your own validation.
Wow, this is a really good point. I just checked and yup -- my AppleID is directly linked to my icloud email, and I've never once checked my icloud email account. I wonder what's in there. Meh, too lazy to go check it
This means that you must either prove ownership of domains, or pre-add email addresses to Apple's systems. I understand why they have done this, it will reduce spam considerably, but the private relay system is already designed to empower users to do this and this extra step may be impossible for some developers.
Take for example a retailer – they need to dispatch goods and use different carriers in different countries. When the user buys something they very likely want email notifications about delivery, a feature that most carriers provide. For the carriers to send those notification emails you'll need to pre-add them all to Apple's systems. You can't prove domain ownership because fedex.com isn't your domain, but where are those emails going to come from? Better hope your carrier doesn't change sending address at some point or the email goes into a black hole.
Apple also limits the number of domains and addresses you can send from. In the original documentation it was "10 domains and addresses" (not sure if 10 of each, or 10 total). This was raised to 100 I believe, but that's still probably an issue for larger multi-national companies, or those who necessarily have to integrate with many external services.
The really hard-line privacy stance is that the retailer shouldn't share the emails and should do the notifications themselves, but for many this is prohibitively difficult to do, or at least detracts from places where the retailer can actually add value. The benefits are also very small, as the contracts with carriers typically protect user data, require deletion quickly after delivery, and retain most privacy benefits while allowing for a good UX.
"These are both excellent points, and it’s absolutely true that some of the arguments above apply to creating an account via Facebook. That’s why we’re also announcing that we’ll be removing the Facebook Login from AnyList."
They didn't want to implement Sign in with Apple, so they had to remove FB login.
They're essentially using their control of the iOS ecosystem to benefit unrelated products.
I seem to remember that those kinds of actions didn't work out well for Microsoft :)
Specifically, if you implement Sign In with Apple, then they are still your customers as much as ever, they just might choose to hide their information from you because they don't trust you, which means that the power in the relationship is transferred to the user instead of the app developer.
I think GP is absolutely right here. Apple can take the customers at any time for any reason. Apple could ban you from using Sign in with Apple simply because Tim Cook doesn't like what food you eat for breakfast. So, I have to agree with GP that these are Apple's customers at this point.
I actually can consciously accept the 2 in many specific cases but 1 and 3, each alone, are enough for me to avoid using this kind of sign-in.
Apple "demanded" companies either add their privacy friendly sign in option, or give up on the data-slurping Facebook google sign-ups. This company gave up FB sign in, which they acknowledge is pretty gross and bloated.
Is that actually true? None in my household are.
But, when I setup the account for my mom and my wife, I just created an iCloud email address.
My wife never uses her iCloud email address. I don’t think she uses the default mail client - she uses the gmail app.
You're the only one, then.
What's happening here is another revolution. Email spam got so bad, that Congress actually passed a law. Which, of course, did almost nothing. People got so tired of spam, that they avoided email, and allow the services to silently remove 90% of the crap.
This has now spilled over into voice calls, where it got so bad, so quickly, actual legislation was considered again. But people quickly realized that their phone contained a curated whitelist. Now, I never answer unless the number is recognized, and I think most people are doing the same.
Texting is also similarly whitelisted.
At this point, email systems and clients need to start with the assumption of whitelisting. Instead of just a "spam" folder with obvious crap, and controls to flag or unflag messages in that folder, we also need a "questionable" folder, with controls to mark as "known" or "unknown", as well as "spam". Emails shouldn't make it to my inbox unless they pass BOTH the whitelist AND the spam check.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...
After the user has shared a private relay email address with your app, they can find, view, and manage it in their account settings at Settings > Apple ID > Password & Security > Apps Using Your Apple ID.
The relay server transforms your email address so it’s readable to the user. For example, sales@xyz.com may become sales_at_xyz_com_<something>@privaterelay.appleid.com instead of a random email address. Replies from the user are still routed back through the service to preserve the user’s privacy.
To send emails to users with private email addresses, you must register your outbound emails or email domains and use Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to authenticate your outbound emails.
Email-only logins work fine with technical users, but non-technical ones absolutely suck at maintaining their logins and passwords. You lose users because they can't login for whatever stupid reason - one of the thousand stupid reasons - and they turn away to never come back, or they register afresh. This is the reality and yes, 3rd party auth is beneficial for popular (non-techie) services.
As for Apple Sign-in, haven't tried it on the development side yet but I can imagine it reduces friction even further and makes the user experience even nicer. This may be such a big bonus for your service that you may ignore the fact that you can't always collect your users' real email addersses. Find other ways to communicate: in-app messaging for example. If the user deletes your app then retargeting via email won't help much anyway - they will mark you as spam and overall it will probably do more harm than good, I think.
Apps and devices serve me, not the other way around.
Why is email address obfuscation an important component of online privacy? There are so many other more invasive and pernicious privacy concerns to worry about. It seems like we're spending an enormous amount of time to build far more complex authentication systems that are brittle and confusing just to avoid sharing an email address. Why?
Email addresses are supposed to be semi-public. If I share it with you I want you to contact me. People do abuse this, of course, but the open nature of it is exactly its best quality. I can sign up for new services easily, they can contact me, and if they bother me I block them.
I've had the same email address for almost 20 years now and have never had issues managing it. I cannot say the same for Facebook connect and Google Auth. I actively avoid signing up for services if I have to use a 3rd party auth service.
It makes cross-site/service tracking very easy.
I'm fairly certain that detecting someone hiding their e-mail from you and then making them pick a different e-mail goes against the spirit, if not the rules, of Sign In with Apple.
That said, it would be extremely beneficial to pop up a screen saying "Hey, is this the e-mail you want to use for communications?" and let the user decide.
That said, removing third-party sign-in is also a fine solution, almost definitely a better one, and simplifies things immensely for everyone involved (assuming their sign-in form in the app supports saving passwords to the keychain).
I think it's more about _letting_ them pick a different email. While I can understand that AnyList (or any other app for that matter) would want to, on occasion, send marketing emails to users, I don't think any app would, in their right mind, _require_ the user to provide a 2nd email address.
But by allowing them to optionally give that 2nd address, they can provide a path forwards with people being able to use Sign In With Apple (of course, that means some users may opt out of marketing emails entirely by refusing to provide a 2nd address).
This does probably go against the spirit of the feature, but if it actually is against Apple's rules to be doing this (anyone know the answer to this?), then it would definitely veer on the side of user hostility on Apple's part, since I would expect many apps to be taking a stance similar to the one taken by AnyList here.
Many of the objections come from wanting to do things the old way, without privacy and responsible handling of private data.
No, they come from the fact that privacy comes at a cost. In this case, it's much harder to receive support, find your account if you lose it, and get proper communication. Everything is a trade off, and anyone who thinks the reason things have been done this way is only to scoop up as much data as possible is either brainwashed or naive. These changes are adding a whole new layer of complexity, which may be worth it in some cases, but in others it just is a net negative for the customer.
Apple clearly likes the idea of the hide option... personally I would expect a less than positive reception from Apple.
I get where both AnyList (if they asked) and Apple (if they didn't like it) would be coming from here.
It does seem to be a shortcoming here where outside of a user one time sign up situation... you don't want to have to burden the user with coming up with silly names and codes to use social like features that require someone else knowing an identifier for you that isn't email.
I don't want to go back to a time where we have to remember / pass along everyone's ICQ number. ...
If I sign in with Apple and opt out of giving my email only to be faced with a prompt demanding I give up my email address, I'll be upset. I JUST told the app (via checking the box in Apple) that I don't want to give my mail, so why is it now suddenly required?
However if the app allows me to sign in and only asks for my email when I try to interact with a feature that would be more usable had I given my email, then I would be more accepting of it. Though I would still fully expect to be able to use the app in its entirety even if I opt out.
Now what Apple will say to this, I have no idea. But as a privacy conscious user, I would be happier with this.
As for having to come up with silly names, I don't understand why I need to be discoverable within an app. We have established social media and communication platforms, use them. Let me send a link to a friend to connect with them in your random app. I don't need to be able to add them within the dang app.
Just create an invitation or "share list" link and let the user send it in any way they prefer, be it AirDrop, email or SMS.
The recipient clicks the link, and the service can connect the two accounts as needed (allowing the potentially new user to create an account as needed).
Of course another alternative here is they just make users aware of what their sharing email is and allow users to optionally change that, if they want to.
I think their perfectly valid to do what they’re doing but I also don’t buy into this being an overly complicated logistical hurdle either
"For example, Apple vaguely states that you can implement Sign in with Apple on Android, but there is no direct documentation on how to do it. We understand that Apple probably doesn’t care much for Android, but if they are going to provide a login system, and are going to force developers of multi-platform apps to adopt it, then providing no real support for a major platform that these multi-platform apps run on is not acceptable."
Eventually you might realize it’s based on an open standard https://openid.net/2019/09/30/apple-successfully-implements-... and that it’s relatively similar to other such standards, except with the option to mask your email, etc.
As an geeky end user, the only way I trust these services for login is if I can link more than one, or even more than one email from the same provider. That way I know I’ll have a backup in case I lose access to the social network or email address that I signed in with... it’s annoying when I can’t add a password or set an email just because I also want to login without a password sometimes...
On the Getting Started [1] page it lists three options: Apple platforms [use AuthenticationServices], Unity [use the asset from the Unity Asset Store], and "Web and Other Platforms" [use Apple JS/REST]. That "Web and Other Platforms" link provides a wealth of useful documentation [2].
Tbf, the exact word "Android" is missing, but this is an elementary school-level process of elimination that maybe Android is inferred in the words "other platforms".
[1] https://developer.apple.com/sign-in-with-apple/get-started/
[2] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...
So there would be no apple account registered on the phone.
So each app wanting to implement apple login would have to :
- pretty much implement it from scratch
- still have a very subpar experience compared to any other login mechanism (even way worse than email + password) since they would have to ask users to find their obfuscated apple email address.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...
Facebook, for instance, doesn't actually implement OpenID Connect, but has a custom layer on top of OAuth. Their recommended method of connecting is a client SDK for each platform.
We assumed this success would quickly taper off if it wasn't "one click" to sign up with your Google/Faceboook account an talked Neil off the ledge.
Seeing some actual numbers would help me in making that decision.
At any rate, thanks for the hard work you put into it and I've used this site a lot.
email remains the best and free-est login identifier. Most people who are not complete internet plebs have a second email for things they dont trust.
The vast majority of people don’t have a second email for things they don’t trust. You’re living in a nerd-bubble, but the rest of the world is on the internet too.
1) Identity is an email address. If I wanted to rip out Google, or Google kicked me off the platform, all I need to do is add passwords and put a "forgot my password" link and my customers continue business as usual.
2) It's not a google-specific email address. You can create Google accounts for any email address.
3) Google login effectively lets other businesses federate their auth system with ours. When they terminate their ex-employee's @example.com account, the employee loses access to their resources at my company.
I don't think you could get away with this for a consumer company; too many people have strong feelings about FB/G/Apple/whatever. But it's fantastic for B2B.
Mobile number login is even worse! Why do I need to share my mobile number for something where you don't need to have it!
Their whole point was that you could be confident the people were real because they were tied to a real Facebook account.
Also there are cases where a "sign in with <particular provider>" is the only option that makes sense because you really want to integrate with the API of this provider. Take for example a "sign in with GitHub". Or in case of services correlated, take for example Instagram where you obviously can sign up with a Facebook account.
I'm more for letting the developer choose what it prefers for authenticating the user and not having a authentication system that gets imposed by Apple.
These seem to just be contrived arguments to protect their customer data selling bottom line.
Seems out of place to complain about not having email addresses for "support" reasons.
If they truly cannot help users without asking for their email address, maybe they should not have users (login) then.
The blog post was long and winded. And it brought up some very desperate arguments, like the bug bounty offered to hackers when they report security vulnerabilities.
They want people's email addresses, period.
They say that no email breaks the sharing feature. True. But that's something that can be offered later when someone actually does share something with you. They say that the emails will go to the a seldom checked account. True. But users can change email addresses. They say it breaks support service for looking up accounts without email addresses. Again true. But what's another way of looking up accounts? Username. What is another? Apple ID.
They are email network harvesters. Plain and simple. And this is their business model.
And to extend that, if they are a spammy company, that would be exactly why they would be complaining about SIWAI.
Side note, disabling 'load remote content' in email client stops all spam in a while, they think emails are not read.
The examples they give are getting support and sharing things with another person with an account. As a user, both of those things are easier for me if there is an email associated with the account.
Said another way, the Account needs some human friendly global identifier. The email you use to log in is an obvious choice, and anything else would require extra work from the user to set up. You could have usernames, for example, but that complicates the signup process and still makes sharing things hard. I know my friends emails already, but I don't know what username they ended up with on this site.
The assumption both you and AnyList are making is that an email is "THE obvious choice". From a user experience perspective perhaps this "global sharing identifier" should be defined by them.
You'll notice that different generations have different online behaviors. For some, email is their main id. For others, it's their phone number (they don't know most of their friends' e-mail, but know their phone). For others, it's either online handles or nothing at all - think about the device set up for grandma with her daily To Do list.
Of course, having this approach would add some upfront dev work to them but allow them to navigate this much easier later on. And for anyone starting to develop their new app/site/product thinking about this early on can reduce a lot of future headaches.
The real problem is Apple shoving their proprietary, poorly designed services down everyone's throats.
No, I don't want to use icloud email, I already have an email address. No, I don't want to provide a "real" email address after I provided an obfuscated one. No it's not my fault that messages sent to the obfuscated one will go to some icloud inbox that I didn't create and I don't read. No, it's also not my fault that when I contact support I do it from my normal email address and not from the obfuscated one (how would I even do that). It's not the support's fault that they can't connect the two.
It's not the user's fault, and it's not the developer's fault. Apple is the sole designer of this mess. There is no excuse.
When using Apple login, Apple offers the choice of providing an anonymous email to the third party or your actual email. It's up to you. Its about user choice. More privacy or less. Apple wants you to have a choice. Use it or not.
Technically you can build an app that's purely a AR sticky notes specifically on your fridge... but the value of that app is approximately 0.
But the system is indeed weird, I signed up for an account in an app with bike routes and wanted later to check it in the browser and had no idea what or how to find out what my account is or how should I sign in (could be also the app/website didn't implement this properly).
At first, before they had cloud services, you created an Apple account to purchase things from the iTunes store. You could use any email address.
Then they created MobileMe (which was rebranded to .Mac), and that came with an email address @mac.com. (I believe there were a couple of other domains you could choose instead, but don't remember what they were).
That was eventually discontinued, replaced with iCloud, and .Mac accounts were migrated.
Somewhere in all there Apple loosened requirements so that you could use an outside email address as your cloud ID, and made it so a cloud account could could also work as an iTunes account.
For those who created their accounts after that point, it's all sane. Create your Apple account using your outside email address if you want, or using an Apple provided address if you prefer, and then that one account can be used for all your Apple stuff. Buying music, buying or renting video, buying apps, and the cloud stuff.
For those of us who created our accounts before all that, we ended up with an account using our outside address which has our music, video, and app purchases on it, and an account using our @mac.com address that has calendars, photos, and the like.
When they changed it so all Apple accounts could be used for everything, it got even more annoying for us. Whenever we'd see some dialog asking us to sign in to our Apple account, we'd have to guess if it wanted our music/video/app account or our cloud account. If we guessed wrong, we could end up accidentally purchasing apps or media on the cloud account.
Apple does not provide any way to transfer purchases between your accounts, so if you end up with media or app purchases on both accounts there is no way to consolidate other than purchasing duplicates.
If you are willing to do that, or if you have avoided duplicate purchases, you can kind of manually consolidate accounts. You can export calendars, contacts, and the like from your original cloud account, and import them into your original iTunes account. Same for photos, online disk space, and anything else you have on the original cloud account.
Once you've got it all in the original iTunes account, delete everything from the original cloud account, and then just make sure to never again sign into that account. Any time you see the Apple account login dialog, give the original iTunes account.
So you have an AppleID, which is a full iCloud account (i.e. not just an AppleID using a Gmail address.. So you login to iCloud on some device, and then specifically go untick the "Mail" option in iCloud preferences? Really?
That has never been an issue.
Facebook auth used to provide an email address, but it's been almost a decade since I last used their APIs so I don't know if that has changed.
Apple's "provide an anonymous email address" inserts them between you and your customer.
Some makers just want things to work and to keep the process as simple as possible for the user.
Tangent: I signed up for a US TD account recently (in person). They had me write down the username I wanted, so I used LastPass on my phone to generate another random username. They obligingly made me an account with username "ajdgsbrjcobsdhfwvfk" - and password "tdbank123". Yes, I was required to change it on first login, but no, there was no attempt to verify that I was the one doing the changing (birthdate, SIN, etc).
There are good use cases where third party logins are good enough.
{app_name}@example.com goes to the same place, but it is easy for me to see if they sell/lose my email. And if it gets lost I'm done with them I can just block that specific address.
The added benefit is no one can assume that {my_name}@example.com is my bank email address or my email login.
I used to have a standard {username}@gmail.com for a while, but now it is on 20+ breached site lists. Best case? Copious amounts of spam. Worst case? I may have been reusing a password prior to switching to a password manager.
Now, I can just block the email from receiving anything. Two, if I accidentally reuse a password the username is at least different.
I kind of ended up with a love hate thing as well, it breaks pretty much every responsive, UX, accessibility rule out there, but at the same time it was Neil's vision. It's at least somewhat intentional that you have to dig at it a bit.
All that being said my first meeting with Neil I told him "This won't work on mobile" and his exact words were "Fuck Mobile ..."
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Neil-Young-Archives-One-Blu-ray/dp/B0...
It's still incomplete, their implementation deviates from the standard or use some lesser used mechanism like the form_post response_type, requiring custom code.
Implementing this was not a pleasant experience.
It's a choice they made, nothing specific to Google or OAuth.
https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/web
There may be other options if you want to mess with oauth yourself, but this one is pretty near zero effort.
I’ve gotten rid of Facebook, but now my account name is just a bunch of numbers.
Personally I would have considered to hack something on my own time just out of curiosity :D
I think you got this the wrong way around.
This was the first month of Pokemon Go years ago. I haven't heard of it being an issue lately but I also haven't needed to create an account in a very long time.
And a bit over a year the same thing happened. New Pokemon Go account -> log in -> no game. With Google account has been working since.
So, my experience is two tries in the span of two years it did not work.
People don't care about usernames and other crap. They want an easy option - enter email, communicate over email and be found using email. This isn't their banking app or anything that important.
I still agree that they are variants of the same fundamental problem (a single credential protects all of your logins) and that Password Managers are a vastly superior solution to this problem.
But it is worth pointing out that for the layman, using Sign in With Facebook/Apple/Google, is better than single credential re-use.
When I say "layman", I mean people like my mom and grandma. I have tried to get my mom to use a password manager (went as far as to set it up for her, and pay for it) but she just reverts to a simpler solution (which is Social SSO). If she weren't using Social SSO, she would be using her same Facebook password for every site on the internet. So as much as I personally loathe Facebook, I do trust Facebook for securing my Mom's credentials far more than the random scrapbooking website she is creating an account for. In this case, I am grateful that she is using Sign In With Facebook, even though I would never consider such an action for myself. So it is a small step in the right direction.
Granted, their only job is to secure your passwords, but it's effectively equivalent to a single SSO service from a protection standpoint (if all your accounts would accept that SSO login).
Don't worry, they know it anyway.
If you wanted something truly private you could create an account at a provider like Fastmail or ProtonMail and create an alias for each account (or just wildcard a custom domain until you need to send from an address). I doubt any tracking system is based on the domain in your email address... not yet, at least.
Visit https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage to make those changes.
Help article: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202667
Although I will note that it says you can't change your Apple ID email address if you choose an @me.com, @mac.com, or @icloud.com email address for your Apple ID, which is the first time I've seen that warning.
I actually think this wouldn’t really happen in practice as consumers are quick to respond negatively to this behavior, so I’d be shocked if Apple actually did this without some darn good reason (I imagine it will also include removing said app)
That hasn't stopped Apple from remove apps or preventing updates -- clearly inconveniences on users -- for whatever reasons they want. It has happened and it will happen again.
There is no check on this unless your app's audience is Netflix/Spotify/Facebook huge. If you're just an average developer you can be killed off at any time.
Hardware requirements for software is a decades old concept, and it’s true they deprecate and obsolete supported software and hardware on for older platforms, but it’s rare I’ve seen Apple taken a user hostile approach here within supported lifetimes though it has happened yes it is rare.
Their developer experience on the other hand does not see the same care and attention a lot (most even) of the time. That’s because, and I believe this strongly, Apple never wants 3rd party software to have platform influential power over them again, like Microsoft and Adobe did for decades. It’s sad but not unsurprising that their platforms can be very developer antagonistic if you don’t take their happy path (and sometimes even then). To them though, it doesn’t matter until it affects a large quadrant of the Apple consumer base and in some occasions yes not even then, but largely it’s the consumer who has the biggest voting block with Apple in terms of pressure on the platform, as I’ve watched it play it they never had a history particularly after the iPhone came out of having the best developer relations relative to say, Microsoft, who provides a very positive experience in comparison
It’s just not in their DNA because of the fear of having too powerful of vendors putting pressure on the platform that they otherwise control outright. When you look at their policies in this context they make a heck of a lot more sense (even if you don’t agree. I certainly do not always)
But I don't know how much a judge would care about that.
Ok sure. That seems totally the same. Not at all as ridiculous as the invented "monopoly of iOS" that people use to justify the claim Apple is abusing a monopoly position.
Next thing you'll complain Coca Cola is abusing its monopoly position on Coke.
In general, sites use email as an indication of a unique, real person. I imagine most of them do not really care about it afterwards, which is why the SSO systems even work (though, they can demand an email too).
And to answer scarlac's question, yes, they removed this feature a very long time ago.
Anyone in that position would think the app is shady AF and user hostile.
It's not necessarily shady or user hostile when done right, and there are plenty of opportunity to add trust relationship building as a part of the consent process (links to privacy policies; details about marketing policies; etc).
It's also not that different from how many iOS applications (at least) are encouraged (in App Store best practices) to handle consent models for location tracking and notifications: ask the user as they become familiar with the application, not up front, and provide as much context as you can.
That said though, I don't see why the app couldnt just change their sharing model to an "invite link" based pattern. If I want to share something with a friend, why do I need to provide their private information to the app to do it? Why can't I generate an invite link and send that through my already established channels of communication? I don't think the "but your friends don't know your Apple privacy email" reason is very compelling. That might not work in their current system, but it is definitely not an insurmountable problem.
I am not an AnyList user but do they ask when signing up if users would like to opt in to such marketing messages? It’s become such a pet peeve buying something from an online purveyor and not even having the choice to opt in or not on marketing emails and any other form of communication I did not explicitly ask for beyond completing a purchase.
seems like another reason for progressive consent and ASKING your users how they would like to be contacted and honoring those preferences
"Go find some setting and figure it out" is a UX fail. When I share eg a Dropbox link or a Google Photos link, you can get to it whether you have an established account or not. If there's something special about an app that requires an account before interaction is possible, then you can still make it a one-time share.
Yes, it does make user support more complicated. Yes, that's what I want and expect. I hope when I come asking for help, you can't help me because you have no clue who I am and have no way to get in touch with me because I used some email obscuring service. That's on me.
But in this case the company is someone who claims to be "The best way to create and share a grocery shopping list and organize your recipes."
Sharing is part of the deal with them and a sign in process that from the start complicates it is understandably a no go / introduces all sorts of complications that they detail in the article.
Still pretty meh that it is the only solution of its kind without an sdk
Any OpenID Connect (or OAUTH2) library of the devs choice is the SDK.
The Facebook/google SDKs are simply there to add trackers and bloat.
Blame the user all you want, but their "choice" was guided by Apple designed UI and Apple provided defaults. Whatever it is, it's producing optimal outcomes for Apple and no one else.
Either way, Apple could definitely do something with regards to make it easier/more obvious to replace it with a useful email address, especially now as it becomes a federated identity provider.
When I create a new user account on the mac, it asks the new user if they want to create an AppleID. The default is to use their existing email address. You must specifically select an option to get an iCloud account. If you purchase an Apple device, you again have the option of an iCloud account or using your existing email address for your AppleID. Apple is not using some deceptive UI to get you to create an iCloud email address.
However, I guess you still feel it is somehow evil that Apple does allow you to get a free email account where the provider does NOT read your email content and use it to target ads at you. Suboptimal for Apple from a pure profit perspective.
There are tons of people with @icloud.com email addresses that they never use who will fall into the login / customer support traps described in the article.
But sure let's not even acknowledge those very real problems, deny Apple's role in this, and blame users. That will surely solve the issues.
> If a customer contacts us asking for support, and we need to look up something in their account, typically we can just ask them for the email address on their account. But with “Hide My Email” that wouldn’t be easily possible, because the customer would have to figure out the privaterelay.appleid.com email address used for their account.
> Furthermore, if there are platforms where AnyList doesn’t support Sign in with Apple, like Android, and someone wants to log into their account, they’d have to know their privaterelay.appleid.com email address. (And that certainly won’t be easy to find if you no longer have an iOS device.) And then they’d have to create a password with us, since they wouldn’t be able to sign in using Sign in with Apple.
> Finally, for a service like AnyList, which is heavily focused on sharing lists with other people, the “Hide My Email” option greatly complicates collaboration. Typically, customers share a list by typing in the email address of the person they want to share with. If that person already has an account, the list is instantly shared. But with the “Hide My Email” option, your spouse or friends obviously won’t know your privaterelay.appleid.com email address, so when they enter your email address, our systems will believe that you don’t have an account. At that point, you’ll get an email from us asking you to create an account. If you accidentally create a new account, it won’t include the work you’ve done in your existing account created via Sign in with Apple. And if you manage not to make that mistake, then there would be a link between your email address and the account you created with Sign in with Apple, negating the value of hiding your email address.
For the second, that’s entirely the user’s choice. Your app can also allow them to associate a new email address for this purpose (which strikes me as exactly what you actually want since the real unstated motivation here is getting the user’s email).
For the third, don’t make me type in someone’s email. The exact same issue as described happens if they have multiple email addresses too. Just let me use my OS’s sharing mechanism to send a special link that they can open to establish the sharing connection. An invite to share, as it were. Not only does that solve the problem, it’s significantly more user-friendly.
So the solution here is for a developer to add a bunch of code to their codebase on at least 4 platforms just to get to the same exact functionality and level of privacy, but with a worse user experience?
> For the third, don’t make me type in someone’s email. The exact same issue as described happens if they have multiple email addresses too. Just let me use my OS’s sharing mechanism to send a special link that they can open to establish the sharing connection. An invite to share, as it were. Not only does that solve the problem, it’s significantly more user-friendly.
As a user, I find that functionality to be incredibly clunky by comparison (on all platforms). It may be moderately better on iOS than Android, but even then Anylist and others are running multiplatform apps. If I'm using a computer and I need to manually copy a link, open my email client, compose a new email, type the subject and a message, paste the link, and hit send, that feels dramatically more cumbersome than just entering an email address and hitting "share". It also takes a good amount of new code to implement something like that on an existing system that uses email-based sharing, which I don't think developers should have to deal with just because Apple built a lousy login system.
as thomaslord said, this is an enormous overhead, where a lot can go wrong.
> For the second, that’s entirely the user’s choice. Your app can also allow them to associate a new email address for this purpose (which strikes me as exactly what you actually want since the real unstated motivation here is getting the user’s email).
Even more overhead, and more data to manage.
> For the third, don’t make me type in someone’s email. The exact same issue as described happens if they have multiple email addresses too. Just let me use my OS’s sharing mechanism to send a special link that they can open to establish the sharing connection. An invite to share, as it were. Not only does that solve the problem, it’s significantly more user-friendly.
For native only apps, this would also add an additional overhead, as you need to develop a server to handle this.
The point is simple: if you want to protect your email address, that's on you. I personally use a different email address for each service, because it's important for me. But I don't expect everyone will bend over backwards to accommodate me, and neither should you.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing, but this is how things work and I don't have a better suggestion.
(ETA: They make an okay follow up point that someone accepting an invite link sent to a different email sends a signal that they could just go ahead and link that email address directly to the account, and don't see why you wouldn't just give them that email in the first place. But in addition to being a squicky privacy faux pas to automatically link any email to an account without direct user consent, there are plenty of reasons to send emails to an address only indirectly linked to a person and/or that a user would not feel comfortable directly linking to an account. It's a somewhat flimsy argument below the surface, I think.)
It makes my blood boil but from the discussions I see on HN about it, most people here seem to be more or less ok with it.
Does Walmart let you sell your product in their store and say you can look at it there but get it cheaper from Amazon?
Similarly, once I have bought something from Walmart I can use it as I wish. Our business transaction ends there, so your analogy isn't really apt.
> Does Walmart let you sell your product in their store and say you can look at it there but get it cheaper from Amazon?
Funny you say that, because Walmart and many other brick-and-mortal retailers will happily price-match Amazon and each other. You know why? Because they are not a monopoly or pseudo-monopoly and so need to do good by their users to compete.
Of course you can justify Apple's behavior any way because you can claim that I am on an iPhone so I am on their property or something and so they are my overlords but that is precisely what users here are trying to argue against.
Or to be honest, you don't even need to justify it that way. The magical market justifies it because the fact that these apps are on the Apple ecosystem means that staying on it is better for them than staying off it. And no other justification is necessary. And you would not be wrong.
But people have a moral intuition about these things based on how they see the world work, and so they have an intuitive sense for when something seems 'off', even if the market seems like it's working. That's why they complain against things like exorbitant pay-day loans despite them too being an example of a market that seems to be working.
Last I checked, I did not get an iPhone on lease from Apple. This attitude where just because I am on an iPhone means I owe Apple in perpetuity needs to die.
So Apple is being extra controlling here. They consider all Apple users property of Apple, so they take a cut off all digital transactions.
Apple isn't forcing anything here.
The "other platforms" documentation is "make this request, store some data, follow redirects". No code, no helpful links on how you might accomplish these things, nothing. You get the bare minimum.
I'm not saying its impossible, and neither is the article. I'm saying that Apple clearly doesn't care about supporting a platform as huge as Android, and that clearly signals to multi-platform developers that they are on their own.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationserv...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...
The fact that their iOS documentation is so much better than average doesn't mean their "other platforms" documentation is inadequate. It just means there's plenty of room for third parties like indie bloggers to documentation their own approaches in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Rust, or whatever.
Part of the problem is that android is an "other platform" in the first place. Sign in with apple is supposed to be a cross platform feature, but Apple can't be bothered to even write out some decent documentation for a platform with over 2 billion devices. Compare, for example, the Google sign in for iOS[1]. They provide a working example project and full documentation.
If you are a developer supporting a cross platform app, you're not getting much help from Apple. That's what the article is saying: integrating this feature is going to be more work and more risk than it's worth. That's the point.
> It just means there's plenty of room for third parties like indie bloggers to documentation their own approaches in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Rust, or whatever.
We are talking about signing in. This is one of the most fundamental features you need to have. This is not something that you just copy paste from some half baked blog post. It is amazing to me you think that's acceptable.
[1] https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/ios/start
That said, it’s a REST API you query and you get a well defined payload:
> A successful response contains the following parameters: code A single-use authorization code that is valid for five minutes. id_token A JSON web token containing the user’s identity information. state The state contained in the Authorize URL. user A JSON string containing the data requested in the scope property. The returned data is in the following format: { "name": { "firstName": string, "lastName": string }, "email": string }
I could implement this using curl really it’s that straightforward. If you have any experience consuming REST APIs
And to what benefit? This is the point of the article. Sign in for apple is extra work and extra complexity for no benefit (to the developer, at least). It's an immature project and the fact that Apple is putting in the bare minimum effort into the docs does not encourage me to adopt this feature.
Google, in comparison, has a working sample project and step by step guide for implementing Google sign in on iOS[1]. Google sign in is just as much a "curl request" as apple sign in, but they put in the effort to give a high quality, well integrated, and native example.
Apple can't be bothered, which discourages people like OP from adopting the feature.
[1] https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/ios/start
If the goal for the app is for itself to be a tool for identity management, then knowing my email is especially not needed...after all, all identity context is already in the app!
UX should center around ease of sharing some hash value across some other medium, not "searching by identity."
I do honestly empathize with the app creators. But anybody choosing an obscuring email by definition does not want to be identified by email.
Tons of people falling into these alleged traps? Really? What is that based on?
Apple is saying they want their platform to support personal privacy. If an app on their platform offers third party sign-ons that are known to abuse personal privacy, that app must offer Apple's solution that respects personal privacy. Despite it being an imperfect solution, I personally am thrilled that I have that option and I'm happy with Apple taking a stand on one of the most important issues today and going forward.
Some occasional customer support issues vs. providing customers with a real solution to significant privacy issues. From a user perspective the value of having such a choice is high.
Nobody is blaming users. Frankly, I think users are smarter than we typically assume. The support situation is really pretty trivial. If you save the onboarding email sent to the anonymized email address, you've got all you need to interact with an app customer support. People will quickly learn this and get on board if they want the privacy benefit. Its just not a big deal.
Apple's role is about increasing privacy and respecting their user's right to privacy. I fully acknowledge that. Does this create some hassle for app vendors? Yes, but I don't care about that in relation to the greater gain.
You need to support letting the user change their email address anyway. Letting them change it from the privacy forwarding email to something else is no different. And that shouldn’t even interfere with using Sign In With Apple going forward because surely you’re using the user’s unique identifier from Apple to associate the sign-in with your service’s user.
Also FWIW you can use the Sign In With Apple JS approach on non-Apple platforms. This is obviously useful for web, but Apple’s developer site says it’s “for web and apps on other platforms” so you could use this from Android too, it will just take some more work.
> As a user, I find that functionality to be incredibly clunky by comparison (on all platforms).
As a user, I have never connected with someone on a service by typing in their email address. Not only do people routinely have multiple email addresses (e.g. work and personal), but people also often use unique addresses for services (e.g. plus addresses), so it’s not at all a reliable mechanism.
> If I'm using a computer and I need to manually copy a link, open my email client, compose a new email, type the subject and a message, paste the link, and hit send
Why would you do all this? The service can offer a mailto: link that pre-fills the body, so all you have to do is click it, type in the recipient’s email address, and hit Send. And this lets you customize the message as appropriate. Better yet, on Apple platforms you can use the built-in share functionality, including on web with the Web Share API[1].
And if you really don’t want to do all of that, you could have me enter an email that you send a special link to rather than looking up in your user database. That’s still not great for me as a user because it means I’m giving you someone else’s email address, which I don’t want to do, but it’s better than nothing.
The simple fact is, if your sharing mechanism requires me to know the email address someone else has already used to sign up for your service, it’s a crappy sharing mechanism.
Even though there is way more value in supporting Google, than Apple. Google SSO is widely used in small businesses, unlike Apple ID.
Whcih is pretty bad for both developers and users, as a user I cant run my own identity provided and as a developer I have to spend time setting up accounts with ever identity provider i wish to integrate.
Original OpenID just let me as a user use a URL as my identity, so I could use any identity provider I wanted, including running one myself.
EDIT: There is a specification for dynamic client registration but nobody implements it as far as I've been able to tell.
Of course, there may be competing SSSO solutions...
Have you ever actually implemented a proper sign-in process e.g. with OIDC, JWT, SSO etc ?
Because half baked blog posts is the industry standard.
It seems like you are the one who would like to claim otherwise, since to get your app in the store you have already agreed both to the terms of the developer program and to follow Apple's guidelines.
> The user has already paid to download my app from the App Store and Apple has gotten 30% of the cut. What users do on my App after that is none of Apple's business, though of course Apple would like to claim otherwise.
If the App Store runs the way you describe, then everybody would offer their apps for free to avoid the 30% cut and also not have any in-app purchases (since those also have a cut). The result would be the user installing the app and having to go to a website (even if it’s embedded in the app in a web view) to create yet another account, finish the signup process, go through a separate (and usually lengthy) payment process to actually buy the app and managing those payments in cases where those are subscriptions.
One can argue on the merits and demerits of Apple’s current system (which needs an overhaul, IMO), but the other option isn’t without demerits as far as users and user experience are concerned.
Not if it's a movie, music, or video game. I.e. anything with digital content.
Comcast of all people offers the ability to buy movies on demand. Not just rent but outright purchase. If you leave Comcast as a customer, you can have every purchase mailed to you as either a DVD (SD) or Blu Ray (HD) purchase
Steam has provisions in place that if its service ever gets terminated to allow users to continue to use games they've purchased on the platform. They also allow users to continue to download and play games either removed from the store or no longer sold (Alan Wake and Deadpool being two examples in my own library)
Conversely Microsoft's Xbox will de-list titles and make them excruciatingly hard to download, such as Marble Blast Ultra. Requiring you to find the game in your account history and then use that to navigate to a download page
Sony's Playstation is downright malicious with their digital store. Konami's "P.T" was offered as a free download as a teaser for an upcoming Silent Hill game
Once Konami changed their mind however, the game was not only removed from the store but actively wiped from the users console! If you connected to Playstation Network the game would be forcefully deleted from your device
It’s completely different to owning something.
Steams provisions are helpful in practice but ultimately meaningless because you don’t own any of the actual games, you merely have a license to run the code under their terms.
Many stores get around that by having special SKUs that are only available in their store.
Also, Android has a slightly larger share in the US and a much larger share worldwide. Apple is no more of a “monopoly” than the console makers.
It's not foolproof, but given I'm generating the password in Bitwarden anyway, it's not the end of the world if it doesn't catch it.
I too have struggled to remember which third party sign-on I used (or if I used a native sign in), so now I avoid them every time, too.
They're literally only convenient if I want to have an account that I'm happy to 'throw away' or, to accidentally create duplicate accounts for the service.
For anything where I'm actually paying, they're a nightmare. Oh, did I sign into this with one of my google accounts? Was I crazy enough to use facebook? Or which of my emails did I use?
I suppose that's a huge assumption, but that's how I would do it if I was developing against them. That said, it doesn't help w/ the "Hide my Email" or the default icloud.com email addresses people don't realize they're using.
But if you have a Password Manager, then it is literally a single signon solution in and of itself, without the sacrifice of privacy.
Probably, and this shouldn't be a thing. Except maybe for banks, but even then, it's debatable. Here's a handy list of cases when I want to be logged out:
1. I click the log out button.
Which I don't ever do either, because it's my personal device.
Account creation sucks, but I prefer it to letting an ID provider know about it. Although I would trust real third party ones like auth0 more than Facebook or Apple, even if they have a more focused business model.
I don't want to share my spam email with all my friends to get them to share with me. And I don't want to give my primary email to an app that will spam me.
If I want to share something, I'll send a link and the recipient can connect to me that way. I don't need to search them within the app to get in contact, that's useless.
> so when they enter your email address, our systems will believe that you don’t have an account. At that point, you’ll get an email from us asking you to create an account.
This is a trivial part of the problem to solve. Why am I being asked to create an account in an invite email? Why not "log in or create account" and having the link itself be the piece that connects the share to me.
It's dead clear that you don't work with consumers. Your technical bias shows what you care about and you're(an me) are an utter minority.
If you want security, btw - you should have multiple passwords for different things. And ideally not even use a password manager.
Still, I think in this day and age, having a requirement in your product that says "e-mail that is provided should be the one the user uses the most" is pretty naive. In general, it's true, but when it comes to 3rd party authentication providers like Facebook, Google, and now Apple, this kind of requirement is not really useful and will likely cause issues for you down the line, which is why usernames are better for addressing people within apps (e.g, Instagram handles).
Most people use the same e-mail for every single account they have. A large majority of these users use the same password for all of their accounts. (Just want to clarify that I do neither of these things - I have a large set of e-mail aliases and have a unique & secure password for each account I have to set up manually).
If you'll grant me that fact, then all I need is your e-mail from a dump of AnyList's users table, and look up that e-mail in my already vast database of dumped tables, and see that your password was "hunter2". Now I have access to your bank account, because you used the same e-mail and password for that account as well.
This is a bit of a contrived example, but in general, any personal information that is leaked (e-mail included) is bad - full name, address, and the like, which many websites ask for, is even worse, because crackers have even a better shot at guessing a lot of your personal information, and at that point, the ball is in their park.
If you use a unique password for every service, what would you need a unique email for?
Because then you control when the flow of marketing or "Service" related email stops. And you can tell which vendor leaked your email either deliberately or by accident.
Riot does this with Valorant too and the implementation is a nightmare.
My app isn’t untrustworthy at all either. It’s an experimental app which attempts to let users create an iOS app on iOS. My suspicion is that people choose to obfuscate because it’s what’s selected by default.
If I need an email to verify I'm not a bot, that's fine. But if a trusted 3rd party can verify I'm not a bot, then the only reason you would want my email is to do something unethical with it: namely, use my data in a way that I never intended gave you permission to use it.
Being default probably helps, because most people don't know they're doing with software and just accept the defaults assuming they're best practices. If the default were to share the email, you might see more people sharing email, but I would argue it's because people don't know they can and should obfuscate it.
This was addressed in the article. If the service provider does not have your email address, they are severely hampered with regards to customer support.
So sure, it’s default, but unless I’m unique some people will see the default and go “why isn’t every 3rd party login like that?”.
I expect 99% are obfuscating because that’s the sensible choice to make. Giving an app my real email should only be done if there’s an explicit need for this, such as being able to log in from non-Apple devices.
However, I've never built anything directly used "by the public", nor am I very familiar with how Apple Sign in works.
So I'm wondering, as the developer of a trustworthy app, what's the drawback in the user giving an obfuscated address?
Is it not possible for you to contact the user using this address? Does the user have to manually allow getting mail to this address or somehow jump through some hoops to read it?
That's up to the user to decide. For me trustworthy = something like Basecamp, Amazon, etc, not some random small app.
> trustworthy = [...] Amazon
Good point, because your example includes one of the few companies I don't trust at all.
There is a big contradiction in there...
Everything experimental is by definition untrustworthy.
One is true obfuscation - "hide my email". That would be a poor choice for use with any app you hope to have an ongoing relationship with, I'd think.
The other is just the use of iCloud email addresses, detailed in the post, which seemed like a very good and concerning point. It's also much less likely to be a problem with FB or Google login.
And I would literally blow up at Apple, if they forced this on TripIt... Sharing trip information is done using registered email. And iCloud email is crap.
If they tied it instead to what people’s normal mail was, a lot of issues would be averted.
It seems like this entire complaint would be solved if Apple prioritized "obfsucated email works for our paying users" (i.e. deliver mail to an address they select) over "create a strong incentive to use our email service if they want to get their precious emails".
I use obfuscated emails all the time, everywhere, by default. But I selected what email address they forward to when I set it up. How does an app maker get the blame for Apple not doing this?
Edit: Now, the app relying on un-obfuscated email addresses for finding contacts I have less sympathy for. There are many other good options for this, and they should work with obfuscated email address IMO. Seems like everyplace I use has no trouble with usernames...
Trust not to misuse.
Trust not to leak in a breach.
Realistically, my email address is something I trust Amazon with both of, because email isnt how they spam me, they are smart enough they can identify me without my email address, and I expect their security to be more hardened and battle tested.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...
This is obviously the most useful for websites, but Apple’s developer site links to this with the descriptor “for web and apps on other platforms” so clearly they’re ok with Android apps using it too.
Locking things down like this seems to have some serious negatives that Apple needs to reconsider their approach for.
So I don't even really understand how people get into this situation.
Could you provide any details? How is such "registered" email different than any other email?
No, they're not. They're just relying on email as a user verification methods as it's the easiest approach. Other methods are possible.
Did you read the article? It seemed very clear to me that they had significant issues with customer support past just verification.
And what would you suggest as an alternative way to identify the user, anyway? Any alternative method of authentication seems doomed to fail - using a real name runs into issues with duplication, requiring users to set a username would likely require significant changes to the platform to support it and lots of people would forget it when they couldn't get their preferred username, and having a customer support code inside the app wouldn't help when the user loses access to their account.
It seems like there are alternatives, but none that the average user who signs in with Apple and needs to contact support will be able to get past on a consistent basis.
I actually think the customer experience of "I switched from apple to android and now I dont know any of my usernames" is a bigger issue. If apple wants Sign in with Apple to work, it needs to behave a bit more like an agnostic 3rd party password manager, work on every platform, and have ways to interact with it on any device. They should release Keychain as an Android app and Chrome extension, and allow you to use it to see your Sign in with Apple data.
If I can't contact my customers, how do I support them (e.g. report a security problem)? If my customers can't communicate which account is theirs, how do we help solve problems? Email addresses and/or phone numbers make this a lot easier.
I never want "communication" from an app developer unless I initiate it.
It's a fair point, and perhaps its one that the likes of Apple SignIn should solve. On the one hand, even Microsoft and Apple send me heaps of spam under the guise of "communication" and I don't want them to have my email address if I can avoid it. The OP says they have trouble with support, but they can (and it sounds like do) tell people to just check their Apple email. Most places that I contact for support require me to put in a contact email for that ticket because people use throw-aways anyway. As for security problems, well I'm glad you're one of the few companies to actually disclose security breaches. But if the information on the website is actually sensitive, then there should be additional checks to begin with. If it's CC info, you should contact the CC company, there should be 2FA, there should be more than an SSO service, which already prevents the biggest and worst security breach of leaked passwords. In short, I doubt the need to contact a customer unsolicited is so great, common, or difficult as to require that a user disclose a non-obfuscated email address, which people already commonly have throwaways for. And the reason they have throwaway accounts is because 99% of the time, when I give someone a ...@spamgourmet account or whatever, that address gets spammed, even though I told them not to put them on the mailing list (because they share the email with third parties, or just plain ignore it).
The tradeoff is a bad one. I do not have sensitive information on Reddit that is not public. A private investigator could probably deduce who I am by looking at my Reddit posts, figuring out where I live, where I went to school, what family members I have, what my job is. They don't need to contact me urgently about a security breach. You can say when I sign on and lock my account until I acknowledge it, but it's not urgent. Even a website that might need sensitive information and, for some reason, doesn't want to require I actually verify my identity for real to upload that sensitive information, that doesn't mean I'm using the website in that capacity and should give up identifying information in case I need to give up identifying information later and you need to contact me that my information has been leaked.
The perspective is worth thinking about, but I'm unmoved that it amounts to pushing the needle to "you need my real, primary email address." I believe the tiny, tiny minority of companies that actually need that and shouldn't just rejigger their system to better security and privacy practices to start with can find reasonable workarounds or resort to mild inconveniences like requiring a callback number on support.
Thanks for the clarification, I didn't think of this scenario.
This looks like a pretty big problem, as I can imagine a situation where the user doesn't have access at all to the app and may not have kept the initial email with any identifying info.
Isn't there an easy way for the user to know which obfuscated address was used for which app?
This email address is used for a lot of communication with Apple, e.g. receipts from App Store.
I bought my iMac on the Apple store, and the receipt was also sent to my personal account.
At the very least Sign in with Apple needs to support a request for the user to enter the real email they want to use to be contacted by the app after-the-fact for cases where someone obfuscates their email but then wants access to functionality that explicitly requires their real email.
Having typed the foregoing, I realize now I'm basically just saying "don't use any third-party sign-in, including SIWA". Maybe it's fine that the ecosystem doesn't always cater to apps of questionable utility...
I assumed otherwise because they specifically wrote "sharing". Still, I'm not sure agree with:
> requiring them to provide a separate email from the one they registered with completely defeats the purpose of obfuscating the email in the first place
I can't use most apps without providing an email, whether they need it or not. That's a much worse situation than not being able to use some features without providing one (which still assumes me having no access to or knowledge of my own iCloud email).
But if you share a trip to a person who's on Tripit - they just get a notice and a record in their webapp.
