8 min
On June 30th, 2020, Apple enforced a new rule for all app developers, requiring apps to support Sign in with Apple if another third-party login method is also included. Virtuagym and its consumer-facing apps are affected by this new rule.
Essentially it forces us to either implement “Sign in with Apple” or make substantial changes to our apps. After careful consideration, we have decided to release the next version of our consumer-facing apps without supporting the new Sign in with Apple functionality.
Because this has some broad implications, and questions may be raised around this choice, we wanted to take our time to explain in detail why we decided to take this route.
Development costs and maintenance
Firstly, third-party login methods like Sign in with Apple require a lot of technical investment, maintenance and support. We are just a small company and a substantial amount of development resources are required to build and support a new login infrastructure.
Instead of having one central system for common operations like resetting your password and signing in, supporting third-party providers will force us to create special logic for every single method.
The Virtuagym platform has a lot of different functionalities that span across multiple operating systems and applications. Centralizing this authentication logic is a fundamental part of core platform stability and touches a critical piece of our code - account management. We want to get it right. We want to be future-proof and so we have decided against supporting additional third-party login methods, besides Facebook’s.
But technical investments are, in essence, not the main reason for us to back away from Apple’s proposition. In the end, we’re here to develop a great product - and if a product solves real user problems we would not back away. However, we believe that Sign in with Apple doesn’t do this, as it comes with a large set of problems.
Multiple third-party logins are a support nightmare
Offering multiple third-party login systems causes many user experience problems and additional headaches for our customer support teams. Users find it hard to remember exactly which login system they used to initially create their account after coming back after a while… “I created this account years ago.. Did I use Apple, Google or Facebook..?” - resulting in multiple accounts being created for the same person.
In these cases, our “reset password” feature no longer works because accounts are linked to third-party email addresses. If you get locked out of your account and have used one of multiple third-party login solutions, it could be extremely challenging to retrieve your user account.
The problems outlined above are limited to only using Facebook’s login system, because then it’s either email login or Facebook. Because almost everyone has a Facebook account and if not, an email address, there is no real value in adding extra 3rd party login options. However, Apple forcing us to support “Sign in with Apple” would introduce more issues which are unique to this login option.
Nobody uses Apple’s iCloud email
First of all, a lot of Apple IDs are tied to an _iCloud_email address. Those new accounts created at Virtuagym would therefore also contain an iCloud email address. This is not a huge problem on its own. However, a lot of people do not use their iCloud email inbox as their main email inbox.
Many iCloud inboxes are never checked and a lot of users tend to have their “real” email account hosted by Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or elsewhere. In practice, this would mean that none of the emails would arrive in an inbox that is actually checked.
From customer support email conversations to product promotions and from weekly progress updates to workout reminders - they would all end up in an inbox that is never checked, creating extra friction and reducing the value that users get from our products and services.
While we share Apple’s concern with user privacy, we do not share their enthusiasm for their feature called “ Hide My Email ”. In essence, this feature will create a randomly generated email address that looks similar to uh8a776asd@privaterelay.appleid.com whenever a user would create an account. While this idea is great and provides an extra layer of privacy for users, it comes with a set of additional problems. The three main problems with the “Hide my Email” feature are:
If a user contacts us with a problem, we usually need the users’ email address to look up their information. Typically, we would be able to ask for their email address directly. But with the “Hide my Email” feature, that wouldn’t be easily possible because our support team would have to figure out the anonymized email address for that account…
Additionally, if there are platforms where Virtuagym would not want to support Sign in with Apple, like our Android app or web platform, users would have to know their anonymized privaterelay.appleid email address - which would certainly not be easily accessible. Then, when finally found, users would have to create a new password anyway (with that email) to be able to use their accounts and not lose their progress.
Finally, Virtuagym is a social fitness platform that encourages new users to invite each other to groups and challenges, send referrals and much more. If you have a registered account with an anonymized (privaterelay.appleid) email address, the platform would not recognize your actual email - the one that your friends and colleagues would know.. That means a new invitation would be sent to your private email, even though you’d already have an account, resulting in duplicate and unlinked accounts.
The health and fitness market is experiencing a rapid technological revolution. We believe that this future will lead us to a place where a single personal profile with all health and fitness data will be linked to various different parties in someone’s health and fitness lifecycle.
Our growing network of thousands of gyms, studios, and personal trainers worldwide could be expanded with health professionals, insurance companies and corporate partners - allowing users to keep track of their progress in one single app.
Our vision is that users would be able to use the app in their gyms, to find a coach, to use in conversations with their doctors and much more. That would mean one single account for your health and fitness needs. Login with Apple will never be the solution because of all the issues above.
Forced to say goodbye to Facebook Login
While the Facebook Login feature suffers from a number of the same problems that the Sign in with Apple feature does, this is in practice less of an issue because it is the only third-party login we support.
Being able to login with Facebook is a great way for many of our users to log in to Virtuagym and many other apps, without having to create new login credentials for each of those accounts.
It also comes with a few extra perks such as easy sharing across your network. Facebook has become the standard third-party login and Apple has essentially copied their concept, in an attempt to push it to the market years later. While copying is nothing new amongst tech companies, or Apple for that matter (just look at how Apple copied many Android features in its new iOS 14 release) and in principle is okay, Apple goes beyond this in a way which we believe is illegal and is, in essence, evil.
The revised Apple App store Review Guidelines are namely forcing us to make a decision; either bow to Apple and implement their login solution ( as primary option! ) or remove all third-party login options altogether.
We tried to resist the new Apple guidelines, pointing out that they are damaging to us as a relatively small company and also explaining that we believe Apple is violating antitrust laws by enforcing them.
Apple sadly didn’t budge, which of course was not really surprising. We are therefore sadly announcing that due to Apple’s policies we are forced to remove support for Facebook Login in the Virtuagym Fitness and Food apps, as well as in our web environment.
If you are a Virtuagym user and have a user account connected to Facebook, you will soon be able to migrate your account to a regular account, directly from within the apps.
We hope that this article helped explain our stance on the matter and clarifies why we will not be supporting Sign in with Apple and why Facebook Login will have to go as well. We also hope that authorities will take effective action against the growing problem that large tech companies such as Apple make use of their market dominance in a way that could be considered anti-competitive. Apple in particular has multiple cases it is being criticised on, which resulted in a formal antitrust investigation by the European Union, initiated by a complaint from Spotify. You can read more about it in the article by The Verge .
If you have any comments or questions, please get in touch with us and we’ll make sure to get back to you.