No they're not. They're preventing third parties from accessing your data. You can communicate with your customers just fine; it's just that if you sell their data (or get hacked) the email you get is useless.

The parent commenter is correctly pointing out that Apple would be able to disable the email for other reasons as well.

It's not like you can ask Apple to forward emails to your own email server if you decide that you no longer want to use Apple.

I think Apple shutting down your access is a legitimate concern. Yet Apple is the only one who has taken any steps to protect the customer here. The reality is we are unlikely to see other major competitors to Apple find a better alternative because their entire business is built on exploiting user data.

And 3rd parties who create a similar system are unlikely to be successful because they don’t have the clout to convince websites to incorporate them.

- Is there a big enough reason to motivate them to do so?

- If given a "legitimate" justification, would they?

If either of those are "yes" then the question we need to know is: "Is there any appeal, oversight, etc?"

With these emails they could trivially, and surgically, cut off a developer from every customer. It is a one-to-many action that also has no obvious other side effects (unlike bricking users phones).

Not sure where I stand with this, but wanting to point out that the added powers this gives Apple are very real and different from the ones they had before (again, maybe this is a good thing, but it’s undeniable that it is a different thing).

It’s just that whenever Apple decides so, the email you got becomes useless.

Apple is judge, jury and executioner, and it makes the laws. That is problematic.

Here’s a crazy idea: if you don’t want your users giving you a private forwarding address, give them some reason to trust you with their real one, instead of saying they’re idiots who don’t know what’s best for themselves.

But if you come to trust the app, and Apple excommunicates it, should you need to rely on Apple to help you reestablish your own contact with it? That won't work -- Apple already demonstrated that they don't like that app.

That's why makomk's complaint is

> there is no way for users to prove their accounts belong to them without Apple's co-operation

rather than "I should be able to get customer emails from Apple regardless of what the customers want".

If Apple for some reason doesn’t allow the app maker to use the OATH service, I doubt very seriously that they will cancel the email forwarding without the user specifically turning off the forwarding.

At that point both the user and the app provider both have generated email address.

Where's this confidence coming from? If Apple sees it fit to prevent you (the developer) from accessing your Apple specific userbase for any reason / violation, other people seem correct in their theorization that there's nothing you can really do as the developer.

Not implementing this new "Sign in with Apple" will also probably be interpreted as not being privacy friendly by the users, a developer can't really have that either.

Pretty much the definition of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

If Facebook sees it fit to prevent you (the developer) from accessing your FB specific user base for any reason / violation there is nothing you can really do.

If Google sees it fit to prevent you (the developer) from accessing your Google specific user base for any reason / violation there is nothing you can really do.

Worse

If Gmail sees it fit to prevent you (the developer) from accessing your Gmail specific user base for any reason / violation there is nothing you can really do. Gmail already does this occasionally by quickly blacklisting non Gmail senders in their spam filters.

If Apple tells you to take a hike, and then subsequently disables the email redirect -- you're completely SOL. You'd have no way to reach out to the user anymore, unless you took other identifying bits of info. And if you did that anyway, that defeats the purpose of AppleID to begin with.

Most users will probably not even be tracking what autogenerated email they're using, hence you no longer have a way to reliably reconcile what user had which account.

Regarding the GMail specific case though, I fully agree. Being banned by GMail is a company ending thing.

Probably from the fact that disabling these email addresses would be a distinctly user-hostile move. If Apple determines that the developer is actually a malicious entity who slipped malware past the App Review process, then it might be reasonable for them to disable the forwarded emails as well as a malware vendor has no legitimate reason to talk to "users", but beyond that specific scenario, cutting off the email address harms the users who signed up for that service. For example, if the app actually represents a web service, and Apple determines that the app shouldn't be in the App Store for whatever reason, blocking "Sign In With Apple" (which is distinct from removing the app from the app store) and cutting off the email address means the user has no way to recover their account even though the service is still active, just without an app. There is no reason for Apple to take this step as it benefits nobody and only serves to harm Apple user.

I'll even go one step further and say that I personally don't think Apple will do it unless under extreme circumstances.

The thing is though, business continuity assessment still points to adopting Apple login to be a bad idea. You never really know when you'll find yourself in hot water with one of your vendors, especially a vendor who's a LOT more powerful than you.

I agree with the group that's (rightfully, imo) concerned about handing over this amount of power over their business to any 3rd party. There's a real potential for abuse.

The percent of times I want to recieve email communication from something I have to sign up for is very close to 0.

For example, do we need the ability for Apple to delete the link between a company and all their users in one sweep, or is it sufficient to make it easy for individual users to cut such ties?

If the latter, could we remove that giant master switch, or move control of it to a third party?

(I haven’t watched the video, so, possibly, that giant switch doesn’t exist. Skimming https://developer.apple.com/sign-in-with-apple/get-started/ didn’t tell me that, either)

There is, it's called IM2000 where email becomes a pull-based system instead of push-based (so users would have to consent to spam, and spammers have to store their spam to send it in bulk). Unfortunately, despite many attempts to switch over we're still stuck on the current incarnation of SMTP.

There also isn’t an easy transition from now — I can see exactly why we’re “stuck” with what’s actually a pretty great last bastion of decentralization on the Internet, for all its warts.

But yes, the transition would require replacing SMTP so once again we're stuck on a system that is terrible enough to grumble about but not terrible enough to change.

(I would also argue that Matrix is becoming a new decentralised system for the internet, as well as ActivityPub depending on who you ask.)

1. when your business is on the app store it can be difficult not doing whatever Apple wants you to do because not doing what they want you to do can come close to destroying your business. This has often been compared to being a hostage of Apple.

2. If you suddenly decide to stop paying the Apple tax or if Apple decides to ban you - cutting you off from new business - it can certainly be problematic and can kill many businesses but you could theoretically keep going because you could have a customer base you inform of your decision and tell them to download your app from your homepage instead of the app store etc. In short - in the event of Apple not liking you anymore you can communicate with your customers.

3. In this new setup if Apple does not like you anymore you cannot tell your customers hey Apple doesn't like me anymore.

Thus Apple increases its ability to hold your company hostage and thus I do not believe it is the same logic as Google controls Gmail unless when selling an Android app Google only allows you to do so if your customer has a Gmail account.

Centralization of communications is not a good thing and it's worth discussing whether we're going in the right direction.

Google does not have a mapping between an application and email address the customer used in that application. Also Google is not really enticing a customer not to provide the service provider any email address other than the ones in the mapping.

But you're right, it does give Apple power, just the same power that has already ceded to Facebook and Google through their logins.

The reality is that companies need to understand that user's are sick and tired of being spammed, and are rightly annoyed by needing to provide every company with their email address for no good [to the user] reason.

I totally agree with your point that this is arguably a good thing, though; although I don't personally own or use any Apple products, there are fairly few services I'd want to sign up for that I'd want to ensure that they had my real email, and I'd be happy to make sharing my email address an opt-in choice rather than the default.

Apple sells me thousand dollar phones and services. Until they start selling my data to ad brokers and becoming a Google I’ll support Apple on this going forward.

Also, you may want to check the news about Apple selling data ...

Yes Apple sells ads on its AppStore and allows ads in apps. But what they sell is the chance to be in front of a billion affluent iOS owners which is different than using every bit of data from every Google property to create a profile of a user so as to target ads even more effectively or show you even more extreme videos to keep you ever more engaged a la YouTube.

There is no requirement that you only support apple sign-in, you just aren't allowed to require user's to sacrifice their privacy to use your app.

If Instagram is using https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/ with the little “log in with Facebook” button, it’s a social login. If they have their own proprietary way to do it in-house, it’s not, and not subject to Sign In With Apple.

That easy.

If it "chose provider" then yes, apple could shove in their own with the pretense of user privacy, while it is painfully obvious that it's just leveraging their appstore control to grab market.

Not even OAuth can be unambiguous. I can have a single OAuth login. That could be myself as provider, or leveraging some other provider, which could be more or less connected to my app.

The comment is saying you're free to implement your own auth mechanism using plain ol email or a phone number, but you also have to support Sign in with Apple

a. actual users have a non-FB/Google OAuth identity

b. apps have something other than google or facebook login?

I've literally never encountered an app that had anything other than google or facebook for their oauth login. The only site I ever encountered that used something different was stack overflow a decade ago, and I recall them killing it off or at least complaining about it.

I suspect that the reality is that in a regular user's experience Google and Facebook login are the only ones they've ever encountered.

Third party apps don't have to use e-mail for logins. They can use user names.

Backers of e-mail based sign-in often call it a "frictionless" method for the users to sign up. What it really is, is a frictionless method for them to collect information about their users.

But this is also specific to "social" logins - eg ones where you aren't intentionally providing your email address.

More in-depth article about it: https://www.troyhunt.com/im-sorry-but-your-email-address-is-...

For accounts that really matter (not throwaways), someone needs to know a fair bit about the user's identity to ensure recovery works. It can be delegated (and probably should be), but that moves the identity problem rather than eliminating it.

Maybe someday we'll all have two Yubikeys (one for backup) and register with each website using them, but that's not how things work today for most users.

This "problem" has been routinely solved by free forum software and other systems for decades now.

(I still don't. My email address is public. But some people apparently do.)

- financial accounts: they would never use a third party login anyway.

- social accounts: None of them are going to let you login with third party accounts anyway.

- work accounts: Again they arent going to use social media accounts. They are going to use some type of ADFS federated account.

- My AWS account: I use Google Authenticator for that.

I lost my original Reddit account because I never gave them my email address and it was hacked. (Using a throwaway password set back when I didn't care about Reddit.) I contacted support and they shut it down, but without some other way of knowing it belonged to me, wouldn't give me my account back.

Absolutely. I have hundreds of different independent ROMs to choose from many of which are completely FOSS. I get to add or remove any app I want and don't even have Google Play services installed.

The only software I don't control on the device are the proprietary drivers and boot loader. But that's no different from my Linux desktop.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervailing_power

I think you are right that it will be an issue in the long term if things stay the same. Somewhere I hope this forces the other players in the field to react, to avoid Apple getting too much power.

I don’t see anyone else right now that can force app devs to support this scheme (for instance I saw countless signup pages that reject gmail’s + syntax, companies clearly don’t want to be filtered), nor that would be trusted for now by users to not abuse the situation.

Perhaps Microsoft could ? barely, as they for instance were sticking ads in their browser.

So, in a way I see Apple doing what only them can do, and hope it creates enough precedence for other minor identity managers to step in and being a more sane solution for the long run.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_account

You are the 1st party, the service you want to use is the 2nd party and Apple is the 3rd party.

I don’t understand this complaining. Everyone who has a business has to deal with these sorts of things. That’s why people pay businesses, so we don’t have to deal with the hassle. This is the essence of running a service, such as developing apps.

Or in the best interest of Apple.

“But then Apple will be a monopoly and you’ll get screwed anyway”. Maybe. But no more than I’m already being screwed by every other cable provider, cell phone company, data broker...etc. I like Apple products. I will continue to spend too much money on them. I’d rather be screwed by Apple in exchange for some pro-user policies, than screwed by every other company that’s already screwing me in exchange for...oh right, nothing.

This is not true with Apple. They often ban superior apps to force their users to use Apple's inferior apps.

Once you understand this, you will be able to understand that this isn't pro-user at all. This is giving Apple control, and making it harder to switch in the future.

I’m not saying it’s definitely never happened, but I’d be love to read about some examples.

once apple starts gaining traction with this feature, it's positioning will inevitably change, possibly for the worse, and then we back another borse who will keep apple in check.

unlike on game of thrones, our watch never ends.

So you better log in with your own email, but of the 3, I’d rather pick Apple as the lesser evil!

There's really no such thing as checking for a "real" email address, though lots of sites do blacklist known anonymous email domains like 10minutemail. But nothing can stop you from just signing up for a new Gmail.