FastCompany:
Increasingly, Apple is turning its privacy stance into highly visible parts of its products.
One major WWDC debutante, an iOS 13 and MacOS Catalina feature called “Sign in with Apple,” might be the company’s most tangible act of privacy protection yet. It’s not a productivity, communications, or entertainment app with data privacy is an added-on guarantee. Its whole purpose is to help users preserve their own privacy as they move around the web. In that sense, Sign in with Apple may be the very first privacy product from Apple.
This might be one of the best new features Apple announced today. I never sign in to apps or sites using my Facebook or Google logins but lots of people do, giving up user data in the process.
I have been wondering if this service will take off. Seems websites have a monitory motivation to not let it succeed.
I love this feature, but feel uncomfortable with Apple flexing their muscle and making it mandatory to any app that uses its competitors.
Which websites have a monetary motivation to not let it succeed? It seems to me that the only sites that have that motivation are sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter that currently offer this service. And since they provide the service but do not make the apps that use this service as a sign-in mechanism, I’m not sure what they can do to prevent it from succeeding.
If they were making it mandatory to use this as the only option, I would agree.
I would love to use this feature, but our app is cross platform and I expect this will throw some huge problems into our sign in process. (Mainly, you won’t be able to sign in to the same account from anywhere else.)
Luckily, we don’t offer Facebook or Google login either so we’ll probably be exempt from the requirement to support it.
Is it even supported on the web?
According to Apple Developer page that’s a major bit of functionality for apps and web pages.
I was wondering which websites will add the Sign-in with Apple button (like they have Discus, Facebook, Twitter, and Google here). If they allow Apple sign-in, doesn’t that cut into the website’s revenue by Apple not allowing spying on our web use? Or am I making a mistake assuming that’s what it does?
I don’t think that’s at all what they are doing. It’s an alternative option that protects one’s privacy.
They are forcing it by enforcing solely with a stick and no carrot. Sites use the other ones, with all the attendant data for a number of reasons, many of which are financial. What would be a better way to encourage it is recognize that there is significant value in consumer data and give an additional benefit to the developers to implement it. That’s a big reason why the other social buttons took off. Something like a discount to App Store fees would provide sufficient incentive. Even Facebook tried to implement an anonymous sign in service and it got no uptake because the developers didn’t want it.
https://www.getrevue .co/profile/caseynewton/issues/an-antitrust-case-looms-and-apple-tempts-fate-182505
This feature alone might spur me to skip Mojave entirely on my primary machine.
As a consumer, I have no problem with an additional option for sign-in that bypasses Google and Facebook.
I had no problem with Apple providing its own browser as a default OS install, either.