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Copper is a service for developers who want a seamless, always-improving signup and signin flow in their websites and iOS apps. We remove friction so more people become and remain users, while makers ship faster and maintain less code.
Give Copper a try, create an app if you are developer, and share your reaction, please 🙌.
🗣 to @gwil, @erondu, @keesan, @sandofsky, @verbagetruck and @jeremygoldbrg for making a hell of a team.
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@dougw love the idea but found two very annoying bugs... the first i can't enter the numbers with the number pad on my keyboard, the second bug reduces the size of the popup as I enter each character on my email. Also I'm in The Netherlands and it works here :)
sounds pretty cool.
may somebody from the copper team walk me through the szenario if my phone is stolen. maybe from my own standpoint as well as from a thiefs perpective. thanks.
@gopietz not copper team but this is probably one of the first things you want to do even if you have/don't have copper: get hold of your phone company, tell them to block the sim-card / phone and issue a new sim-card to you (with your existing number).
@gopietz if your phone is stolen, and you aren't protecting your phone with a password or Touch ID, then you are going to have problems with a service like Copper, which uses your exclusive access to your text messages to verify your identity. But then again, if you haven't locked your phone, a bad actor would presumably have access to your apps, and your email which can be used to reset passwords on nearly every account. So we're counting on people locking their phone, which is happening more and more, as people understand the risk of not doing so. All that being said, SMS has many issues which we recognize, and we will move away from it, but the ubiquity is too hard to ignore for now.
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@dougw thank you for the reply.
Lets say the phone is locked and the thief has access to the phone number. (Im not sure if an attacker could identify the phone number from a locked phone) wouldn't that also be a problem since the lock screen shows the texts?
Also, how could I log in while my phone is gone? It takes some time until my provider can send me another sim card.
@gopietz if you lose the keys to your house with address attached, that's a problem. Similarly, if you leave your phone unlocked or messages visible without unlocking, then you've left yourself open to a similar risk on the digital side. Most people lock their devices and messages now as our phones become central command for our lives, and we're leaning into that trend.
All that said, there are some obvious things like backups in the event of a lost phone, and ameliorating some of the security and deliverability issues with SMS that we'll get to in short order.
@dougw The problem here I think is that for copper, even if my phone is locked and everything, a thief can still take out the SIM card and put it into another phone, access the phone number and then everything else. Apps are tied to a device, but phone numbers are tied to SIM cards.
Another (minor) issue is international travel.
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US only?
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@lajlev I am from the UK, with a UK mobile number and could use it just fine, with my international code at the start (44)
Hi! While it looks fantastic, it feels a bit like Digits or identity management by Twilio. Would love to try out Cooper as well, but are there any benefits to using Cooper over Digits or Twilio?
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@levibostian fair enough! 😆 If they now would allow me to store phone numbers as well, my current workload would be reduced by almost 60% 😂
@levibostian@ihatedotpink you should have seen our first versions, totally Copper branded. But we've listened and learned and have fought hard to pull all of that back because we heard that makers want to offer a great experience for the people they serve. We want makers to see what we're doing as an off-the-shelf solution to a problem common to many apps, how do we register and authenticate users, which means this trend will continue.
@ihatedotpink@levibostian you can store phone numbers, and any information you ask for from the user. Just be sure to add 'phone' as one of the items you ask for and it will be returned when the user completes the auth.
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@dougw Thanks for the explanation. To get it perfectly right: I need to ask the user for his phone number twice? First he needs to enter his phone number to verify the number and then in a next step he needs to enter his phone number again to actually store it in the db? Is that correct?
@ihatedotpink@dougw only once. If you add 'phone' as one of the items you ask for, Copper will auto-complete the number field for the user in the next step (since they entered it in the first).
So instead of people logging in with 1 click via twitter, google, or facebook (services you can control fairly easily) you're asking people to use their phone numbers? And then asking them confirm via sms code.
This seems harder than social sign-up :(
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@johnnyquachy I think it depends on the users. There's something to be said for social signup and coding your app so if they sign in with different social networks it doesn't create duplicate accounts. I've seen many apps that do just that. I sign in with facebook one day, sign in with twitter/google the next day. It's easy enough to do, and then you have two accounts. To rectify that, you have to code your app to be able to take those accounts and merge them together. Either by having additional options on the profile page and having the user signin to each one, or by doing it seamlessly from the login screen. Doing a phone number login takes that out of the equation, especially on mobile. It doesn't work as well on desktop or tablet of course.
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@thehashrocket@johnnyquachy Or just sign in with the same social account. I m not necessary the same person on facebook that I m on twitter :)
@ekambos@thehashrocket fair enough. These don't seem like huge problems. If you want to make 100 accounts in facebook or gmail you can.
This is solving a developer problem? I guess a fairly small one.
Nice product! What kind of pricing model does this have and how are you going to compete with Facebook Account Kit (which provides 100,000 free SMS messages per month)?
@parkeragee free as in beer at the moment. We want to take a different model where we find value added services for the people we serve, and not charge developers or sell user data to marketers. The opportunity we see is to build a product where our users are also our customers.
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@dougw@parkeragee applause for taking on the social media juggernauts.
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