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Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

Your vision of the world with your app is that people don't use it because of its account requirements?

I think the comment above has been edited, me and my wife did not see the last sentence before now. It's very surprising to me that the Hacker News is so against having an account? Most of the internet requires one nowadays.

I will keep following the direction/mood of the comments and react based a whole view, so far around +80 people have downloaded, with 4-5 people talked negatively about account requirements.

Much of the internet requiring it does not mean anyone likes it. Especially among the HN crowd.

“Most of the internet requires one” is not a good reason to require one when one is not needed.

By this logic most of the internet is full of ads so you should go ahead and add those.

By looking at your site i don’t see why an account is even necessary and that’s probably why people are rightfully complaining about it.

Very true, it is not a good reason, we do this for now due to the security, users calendar, notes, and partner related information is truly personal, so for now it's much more secure. But it's really interesting to see all the feedback, so thank you!!

> Very true, it is not a good reason, we do this for now due to the security, users calendar, notes, and partner related information is truly personal, so for now it's much more secure.

...No?

"Much more secure" would be not saving anything on the server that doesn't need to go there in the first place (move things and logic to the client from the server - what value does the user get from uploading everything?)

Or if this is for syncing/backup purposes, at least encrypting data on the client before with a key only available to the client before uploading the encrypted data to the server (this sounds overkill and unnecessary for the goals of this app).

User data is a (in places legal) liability for you. Handling it properly will cost you time and money. Without extracting additional value ("selling") it, it is not in your interest to centralize it.

Simple rule of thumb: If you don't strictly require it to provide service to the user, don't strictly require it from the user. For optional functionality (email reminders, server-side push) requiring server-side to collect additional information, that information and functionality should also be opt-in. This is the gist of GDPR. As you note, many companies either (obliviously or not) flaunt it or employ dark patterns or legal chicanery to maliciously comply (courts are still out on the latter in many cases).

Anything you put elsewhere is not more secure, unless you are more secure than Apple's servers, which seems highly unlikely. If you don't have it, it can't get compromised.

The user has an iCloud account, you can write to iCloud storage without making them "sign in" to your app. It's their data, they can find it in the folder for your app in their iCloud drive on a Mac.

And see https://developer.apple.com/game-center/ for a way to let two users coordinate "play", multiplayer, turn based, achievements, etc., which cover most of the interaction you'd need.

For sharing personality test, a person can do their own and their partner's, but for a better take on the partner you and your partner can each take your own test then generate a sharable fun code that captures the "bits" of the answers without repeating the test. As partners, you could tell each other the sharable code as a NFC bump or QR code to scan, or generate one of the word based codes like bitcoin wallet passwords.

See BIP39: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.

(This passphrase would be short if the test results distill down to a smaller set of outcomes, like 64 questions give 8 results. It would be long if you need all 64 questions' answers to match with.)

I added the last part later because I was really excited to try this until learning it required so much personal information up front just to see what it is. Generally I’m willing to create an account on a platform I trust, am familiar with, and certain will be useful. For this type of thing, I would not expect it to be necessary, so it feels weird, and makes me suspicious. It’s also just a hassle- usually apps like this have a guest mode so you can initially explore without hassle, and then only create an account when doing so is useful to the user, and they are sure they like the app.

It sort of feels like someone asking for a commitment on the first date…

Haha good analogy, thank you for your comment! As said in some of the other comments, I am very surprised to see the push back on the account creation. I do have Guest Mode in the roadmap, but based on everybody's feedback, I will prioritize it much higher. Again thank you for taking your time to comment!

Good luck, I really do believe your idea is a good one that can help people! HN is full of privacy obsessed tech people so take the feedback with a grain of salt.

However, lowering the barrier to getting to try out you app is going to give you much better user retention. When I download any app and it immediately asks for an account and or a credit card, I usually just uninstall it. I suspect that is true for most people.

Why do you need them to have an account? What on your roadmap requires it?

And perhaps you could leverage Game Center accounts for "play" data, which leverages Apple's sensitivity to provide privacy while allowing achievements, multiplayer, and turn-based games, between partners.

https://developer.apple.com/game-center/

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