WWDC 2019: Apple Takes on Google, Facebook With New 'Sign-In' Feature

Apple has debuted “Sign in with Apple”, a new login feature that it pitched as a more secure and private method for logging into apps than rival services from Google and Facebook.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, showed off the new “sign-in” tool on Monday during the company’s annual WWDC developer conference in San Jose, Calif.

Using the new feature, people will be able to log into third-party apps without having to manually create a new user name and password or to log in using their existing credentials. The fact that other companies like Google (GOOG) and Facebook (FB) have similar “sign-on” features was not lost on Apple (AAPL).

In fact, prior to introducing the feature, Federighi showed an image of Google and Facebook’s sign-in tools. Although he said they “can be convenient,” he said they can compromise user privacy.

“These logins can be used to track you,” Federighi said. “We wanted to solve this.”

Sign in with Apple in iOS13 #WWDC19 pic.twitter.com/fkQNVP7CBJ

— Gaurav Chaudhary (@TechnicalGuruji) June 3, 2019

Federighi said that companies can use login features like Google’s and Facebook’s to track consumers across the web. In contrast, he said Apple’s new feature would let people sign into third-party apps “without revealing any personal information.”

If people don’t want to share their real email addresses with third-party apps, they can choose to have Apple’s sign-in feature create a random email address to help verify them. The randomly generated email address would also forward messages to users’ real email accounts, and users can shut them down whenever they want.

Additionally, Federighi said that the new sign-on feature works with Apple’s Face ID technology, which lets people sign into third-party apps using their faces and smartphone cameras.

Apple’s latest feature is another in a series of digs against competitors like Google and Facebook, which have made number of privacy and data blunders over the past few years.