by Dan Moren
Why AnyList isn’t supporting Sign in with Apple
AnyList, a popular app and service for creating and sharing lists of all kinds, won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple, and a blog post by co-founder Jeff Hunter explains why:
Another sign of Sign in with Apple’s immaturity is the sad state of the documentation for it. Good documentation is critical to facilitating developer adoption of any service. Since Apple is expecting developers to adopt this service by June 30th, it seems reasonable to expect decent documentation. Sadly, like most of Apple’s recent developer documentation, it’s sorely lacking. 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.
So, there’s a lot going on here. I think, for the most part, AnyList’s concerns are well-founded for their particular offering. There are a number of things that the app needs to do that aren’t supported well by Sign in with Apple—for example, the ability to share lists with another user. Or cross-platform support with Android.
Other concerns are perhaps more overblown, such as the recent, now patched, security flaw in the system. It’s not that such a vulnerability isn’t serious, but extrapolating a huge fundamental flaw in the program is perhaps overstating the matter.
Certainly, not every app should be required to use Sign in with Apple. My wife and I use AnyList to share our shopping list, and I have no compunction about having created an account with their service.1 But mandating Sign in with Apple in cases where apps already support a different sign-in service seems not unreasonable.
I think it’s fair for AnyList to say Sign in with Apple simply isn’t the right solution for its product. As part of compliance with the new rule, AnyList will be removing Facebook, the only other third-party sign in option they offer, which Hunter points out had lots of its own problems, including poor privacy protections.
The deadline for the new rule takes effect today, so it’ll be interesting to see how many apps implement Sign in with Apple, and how many follow AnyList’s example.
- That said, if they got bought by Facebook, Amazon, or some other big company, I would probably reconsider. ↩