“Sign in with Apple” is the ultimate tool for ecosystem lock-in.
iMessage used to be the biggest method of locking people into Apple’s ecosystem, but this legitimately great privacy tool is a dark horse to ensure you never, ever, switch to android.
Global logins are an incredibly useful tool and are in some ways the OG of password managers. You remember one password (your Google or Facebook one), then you can get easy access to all of your favourite apps/services without ever having to remember them. Gone are the days of remembering your Netflix, Spotify, Dropbox, or Classpass passwords, simply hit a button and sign in with Google/Facebook. I’m sure an absolute tonne of people log into the majority of their services with this functionality (I know used to).
Initially, an Apple-powered version of this seems great. Why would you click ‘Sign in with Facebook’ or ‘Sign in with Google’, when you could now click ‘Sign in with Apple’. Keeping your data/login info with a privacy-centric company that won’t even give your email address to the app you’re signing into.
Apple hammer this home in their keynote, calling out how these log in buttons often provide a whole lot less privacy than you realise.
However, it isn’t quite as simple as it seems. ‘Sign in with Apple’ is basically giving Apple the key to every app on your phone. And a key that only works on iPhones.
What happens if you’ve used ‘Sign in with Apple’ for most of the apps on your phone, but a year or so later decide to switch to Android.
In short. You are screwed.
Android apps are vastly unlikely to support ‘Sign in with Apple’, meaning you simply won’t be able to sign into any of the apps you use every day. Apple will effectively be shackling your services to their logins, meaning to use third party apps like Spotify or Netflix that you’ve used ‘Sign in with Apple’ for, you’ll have to cancel and close your old account, and then create a new account/log in on your android device.
Thus, losing all your data (viewing history, follows, message, playlists, etc), and needing to create a whole new profile from scratch. This would suck. Especially if you have to do it for. Every. Single. App. On. Your. Phone.
You’ll be in the same painful hole as people who want to delete Facebook or disconnect services from their Facebook account. If a company holds the login info to an account, they own your data in that account.
From the perspective of Apple this is crazy smart. Not only are they making it really hard for people to break out of their own services (iMessage, iCloud photos, etc), they’re now holding the 100’s third-party apps people use on their phones as ransom.
All in the name of ‘privacy’.