You've been kicked in the nuts: signing up in iPhone apps

iphone.broadersheet.com

15 points·pclark··4 comments

Of course, since the user already went over the "hill" and downloaded or maybe even paid for the app, they will be unlikely to back out. They've already put in effort and they don't want it to go to waste. The most powerful tools against annoying web signups are the back button and bugmenot, in that order. Neither exists for the iPhone. Amazing that you are not cargo culting a signup screen. Maybe save the email address once they first input it.

OpenID is a good solution for this. Single login and the service can pull your email info from it. I haven't seen anyone do OpenID in an iPhone App yet.

OpenID is an awful solution for this -- you have to type a long URL, get redirected to an arbitrary page in a WebKit view (hello 17+ Mature Sex Drug Gambling Violence rating!), type at least your password on that page, and eventually get redirected back.

No, the service can't "pull your email info from it" -- OpenID provides no information about an authenticated user to the service beyond "yes, they are that identifier".

Yes OpenID it does provide your email address. That's why my gravatar icon shows up wherever I login with OpenID.

You don't need to type in a long URL to login using OpenID. If you have a domain you can use it to delegate the OpenID provider to use for logins. So you need something like openid.mydomain.com and a username and login. One set of authentication information to remember instead of different ones for every website or application you use.

You wouldn't want to use Webkit to implement OpenID on the iPhone anyway. You would want to integrate it into your application so that was a seamless process.

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