Building an app without Passwords
Let’s face it. Passwords suck. My brother has been complaining about his email being hacked repeatedly. At first I put it down to a little paranoia, but then I asked him what was his password.
It was something like “ruby1234” — I kid you not.
So anyway, it turns out that most people not in the 1% of the digital technorati, have incredibly bad password habits or keep forgetting them all the time. I’m sure you’ve heard friends who just went ahead and created brand new accounts on services simply because of a lost password.
What if you could signup or login with none of that issue?
We’re currently trying this in the betaversion of Taskpert. There is no login page, no signup page, no page to reset a password. You simply type in a password and receive a login link in your email.
This works whether you’re signing up or logging in. Exactly the same way.
It even applies to notifications. Click on a link to a notification and even if you were not signed in, as you click on that link it signs you in and gets you to the place in your app you need to go.
Passwordless logins have been around for a little while now. Some people love them, some people hate them.
One thing for sure, I’m loving my 2factor authentication with my Google, Apple, Dropbox and Digital Ocean accounts. I just wish I did not have to use a password as well.
At some point for Taskpert, we’re going to add a SMS option too. So you’d just enter your email and we quickly send you a token via Twilio. You enter it and you’re in.
I doubt we’re ever going to use passwords in this app.
Ericson Smith is the CTO of Travel Agency Tribes and is building the Taskpert task managent tool of the future in his spare time.
