Developers say they have mixed feelings about the “Sign In With Apple” button and Apple's decision to make it mandatory for apps with other sign-in systems
Remembering Gabriele Grunewald, Who Ran For Herself and Others — The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist Tweets: @itsmccants and @ultratiem Tweets: John McCants / @itsmccants : @Techmeme @LaurenGoode It's the best solution to validate identity right now. I would trust users who signed in with Apple ID over Facebook Tiem / @ultratiem : I'm really bummed with @wired's article on Apple Sign In: https://www.wired.com/... If Apple didn't make it mandatory, no one would use it. Or rather, only good people would. The dirt bags who don't care about privacy or WANT your info just wouldn't adopt it. Think it through.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Apple debuted Sign In with Apple at WWDC, it paired an email-masking privacy feature with a hard rule: any iOS app offering a third-party login had to offer Apple's too. Commentary at the time was already divided — one column called the mandate less competition than brute force, while another framed the button as infrastructure rebuilt for a post-Cambridge Analytica world.
This piece captures the developer floor's reaction to that rule, and the split maps onto the feature's core tension: John McCants argues Apple ID is the best identity validator available and would trust it over Facebook logins, while Tiem counters that without the mandate nobody would adopt it — meaning the button's reach comes from App Store leverage, not user preference.
First-order effects
- Every iOS developer using third-party sign-in now has to ship and maintain an Apple button alongside it, or drop those logins entirely — compliance cost lands on them immediately.
- Users get a privacy-forward option that masks email addresses, but which apps they see it in was decided by Apple's rulebook, not by developers electing to integrate it.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and other identity providers lose the default position they held in iOS apps and are pushed into competing on privacy terms set by a rival platform.
- The mandate hands antitrust enforcers a concrete artifact: by 2021 the DOJ was reportedly probing whether the button makes it harder for users to switch to rival device makers.
Third-order effects
- If platform owners can convert privacy features into mandatory defaults via distribution control, sign-in becomes a structural moat — and each such mandate invites the regulatory scrutiny that eventually constrains how App Store rules can favor the owner's own services.
The trend: Platform owners are turning privacy features into mandated defaults enforced through app-store gatekeeping, trading user trust gains for mounting antitrust exposure.