SAN FRANCISCO — As we use mobile phones for more and more in our daily lives, we are demanding more convenience — and technology companies are responding.
Apple just started offering its Apple Pay service on its newest iPhones and iPads so consumers can buy products using the device and the swipe of a finger. Google allows you to sync an Android phone to all of your Google services, from Gmail to Chrome, with one initial login. Facebook has persuaded legions of mobile app developers to allow us to log in to new apps with our Facebook identities, eliminating the need for a separate username and password for each one.
Now Twitter is trying to simplify the sign-up process even more by tapping into something that every single smartphone user has: a phone number. With Twitter’s new Digits tool, anyone building a mobile app can easily add a button that allows you to log in to an app by providing just the number on the phone. After a quick text message back to the phone to confirm that it matches the number, you’re in.
“It’s done. Two steps,” said Jeff Seibert, director of product for Fabric, the suite of free developer tools that Twitter introduced at its developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.
With Digits, the person signing in to the app doesn’t need to have a Twitter account, and the company says the number isn’t linked to any other personal data, including any Twitter account that is associated with it.
The concept of using a phone number to log in to an app isn’t new. Some mobile messaging apps, including WhatsApp, now owned by Facebook, do something similar. But Twitter is making the technology widely available. The company says it can be added with a line or two of code to any iOS or Android app, and it works in 191 countries and 28 languages.
“Your phone number becomes your identity,” said Brian Blau, a former software programmer who is now a consumer technology analyst at the Gartner research firm. “That’s the kind of cool feature.”
Mr. Blau said that Gartner’s research, including a survey that it has just completed, shows that people are very concerned about privacy as it relates to mobile apps. “They tend to want to be more private than the apps or the services want them to be,” he said. “Users will choose privacy over other aspects of apps. It’s across the board.”
That could make Twitter’s Digits login more appealing to privacy-conscious consumers than other alternatives, including the social login tools from Facebook, Google and Twitter itself that allow you to use your accounts on those services to log in to other apps and sites.
Patrick Salyer, chief executive of Gigya, which helps companies manage social logins, says that Twitter has trailed Facebook and Google in social logins by a wide margin.
“Digits has potential to change that landscape pretty dramatically,” he wrote in an email. “By tapping into users’ phone numbers vs. email addresses, the company is making it a more sensible option for users in the other parts of the world, where phone numbers are more a commonplace proxy for identity than email addresses.”
Digits also bypasses a concern that Facebook users in particular have expressed: that apps will tap into their Facebook profiles, suck up information about their friends and interests, spam everyone they know and post items on their feeds without their explicit permission.
While Facebook has changed its developer login tools to restrict the amount of information shared and what developers can do with the data — and it is even testing anonymous logins — a recent survey by Gigya found that a significant portion of users were still wary of using a social network account to log in to a different app.
Unlike Apple’s new fingerprint sensor, Digits doesn’t help address security concerns. Although Twitter does send that verifying text message as part of the initial login process, if a phone is stolen and its password cracked, a thief could access any logged-in apps (not just those that use Digits).
There’s also a downside for developers. When someone uses a regular social network ID to log into an app, the developer gets basic demographic information and sometimes even those precious friend lists. With Twitter’s latest offering, they don’t get anything but the login.
Twitter is betting that the simplicity of Digits — as well as other easy-to-use tools for analyzing bugs and auctioning ad space to the highest bidder — will ultimately win over developers, who have sometimes had a rocky relationship with the company. The tools are free, and the ads might even bring in a bit of money for app makers.
“It is entirely about you and your users, not us,” Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, told the developers at the conference.