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Comment by pluijzer | Hacker News Reader

Right now I have put LineageOS on my old tablet together with F-Droid and Termux. When used with its keyboard case this makes for a suprisingly capable device. It is small and lightweight and I can use it to get actual coding work done. It is basicly my traveling laptop now.

On F-Droid, these FOSS offerings of apps can be amazing. Trying to find a piano app for my baby. The once in Playstore pieces of ad delivery shouting garbage. The one I found on F-Droid is simple, clean and exactly what I was looking for.

If it wasn't for the Microsoft Authenticator I need for my work I would have no need for the entire Playstore.

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Depending how locked down your work AD is; andOTP can scan and generate 6-digit codes which Microsoft support.

andOTP is unmaintained, I would recommend Aegis

Thank you; I had missed that. Aegis is also great; but always a pity to loose such a trouble free piece of software.

Thankfully, Aegis imports andOTP vaults with no trouble.

Why is it a problem that it's unmaintained? It's not like the TOTP standard is a moving target.

Tightly integrating into device bio-metrics whilst protecting secrets from advisories is very much a moving target.

Can't you just not use the bio-metrics option for andOTP? Honest question. I tried Aegis, but still prefer andOTP.

If you ask me, the fewer features, the less the attack surface.

Do you have any opinions on 2fas.com ?

I checked them out last week. They claim to be the internet's favorite open source 2fa app (or some similar wording). The trouble is they only just became open source and there is no evidence to support the claim. They are open source so I don't want to spread FUD but for my own personal use case I found the project a bit dubious. Like what else are they not being honest about?

I do in pirinciple like that their browser extension works in conjunction with their phone app.

Gosh darn it, you got us! It’s true, it has to be said… our claim is a complete marketing BS, a statement which our mom said when we were down and beat over a break-up in high school a few years back. Truth be told, we’re actually the highest-rated open-source 2FA app on both major app stores… but it still technically may not be true.

Frankly, our mom’s white lie just kept us together somehow and fueled the fire for development and growth. We were able to work it out with ourselves, process things on a different level, finally be at peace during a tough period of our adolescence…

Now, it’s true our therapist said last week we should probably get over it. - Finally, come clean and face the fact that you’re not actually, indeed the Internet’s favorite open-source app - he said smugly. But it’s a hard pill to swallow, y’know. Especially coming from a guy who we pay to listen to us moan about Authy and Aegis all the time… we should probably just do it the Metallica way and fire the guy. He feels like he’s part of the band, it’s too much… But, we digress!

We needed a push, a spark - AN INTERVENTION. And… you gave us just that. We solemnly swear to work it out with our mom to change that marketing claim on our website. We think it’s time. It probably is.

How about… OUR MOM’S FAVORITE OPEN SOURCE 2FA?

5 upvotes and it’s going live for a week. 20 upvotes and we’re keeping it till the end of May :slightly_smiling_face:

This was really cringey. But I guess your point is you mean you are the highest rated open source 2fa app on google and ios stores? That's great. It's impressive considering you've only been open source for a minute too. Keep up the good work. While the product is "not for me" at the moment, I wish you all the best.

Hi! Thanks for the reply and for your kind words!

We went open-source by the end of 2022, and yes - while we’re still new to the game, and some may say even late to the game - it was, is, and will be a huge deal for us because we strongly believe in the value of open and transparent code. We are also very much a community-oriented team. We know the app still lacks some features. We know there’s still room for improvement, and that’s why we value outside voices - such as yours and the voices of thousands of users on our Discord server and Github, providing us with amazing insight.

Yes, we are the highest-rated 2FA app in both mainstream app stores, but we’re not here to toot our own horn. We still see a clear path of improvement for our code, our features, and our business model to keep and develop the spirit of truly open-source software.

And if you’d like to know more - thou we hear you’re not interested in our app at the time, and we totally get that and respect it - go ahead and visit our Discord server to get in touch with the devs and maybe hint a thing or two to make you like us more in the future! Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

PS. Cringe is the way.

It is not in F-Droid so I can't easily try it.

I never knew this, thank you for the tip! I will try and get it to work this evening.

If you use bitwarden/vaultwarden as password manager you can manage TOTP either on web or via browser plugin with it. In my limited testing with office365/teams a few days ago it worked.

Personally, I have a strong preference for not combining my password manager with my 2fa totp code generator though. Compromise of one meaning compromise of the other, and all that.

I've been doing this for about a year now, and haven't run into any issues with any of the various tools I need to authenticate with. It's a great solution so far, and this one feature makes the entire subscription pay for itself, imho.

PianoOli is one of my favourite apps

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