Authenticator° - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

I'm an electrical engineer, currently working as an embedded software engineer. I had had coding experience in C/C++ and Python before I started learning Swift/iOS development.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

Mobile development is much more different than anything that I've done before, putting together a feature set, and a realistic roadmap on my own was really new for me. However, the most challenging part has been that I do this besides my daily job, and sometimes this takes a toll on me, the most challenging aspect to me was finding the time and mental stamina to work on my app after work, or on the weekends. But it's also really-really rewarding when I get to use my own app and it just works, as expected and I really do feel like I've created something useful.

_{Bence Kaposzta}

Embedded SW Engineer | iOS Dev on the side

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

Carrot Weather: I love the design, the functionalities, it's intuitive and it even makes me smile every once in a while :) I also like Duolingo, it also has a beautiful design, and the gamification of language learning really works, it's made me addicted in a good way. I like the Revolut app also, it's very easy to use, intuitive and I like the functionalities in the app.

How long have you been working on this app?

It's been about 7 months now.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

Just the need for identity theft protection, secure online login, password protection against hackers, multi device support, end-to-end encryption, biometric authentication and convenience.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

I think that many similar apps on the market just get security and privacy wrong. For example, some of them don't seem to encrypt data properly - data in my app is end-to-end encrypted, so no one can access that data, not even the developer if the master key is lost.

Another example could be that many of them offer widgets that show the current passwords on the home screen. I don't think it's a good idea when it comes to privacy. In contrast, my app has a configurable auto-screen lock option, that locks the app after a certain amount of time so that user's have to identify themselves through biometric authentication or their master password. This prevents prying eyes from sneak-peaking the current codes. I've also seen apps that show the secret key in an added token's detail page. This is also just a bad pattern, making it possible to copy that token and stealing the user's private codes.

Last but not least, users can export all their data to an encrypted file, that could be imported and decrypted later, even on another device using the master password that it was encrypted with. Synced data in the cloud is also encrypted, so that even if the user's iCloud is hacked, this sensitive data still remains unaccessible to others. All in all, I just wanted to make sure that there are no leaks in my product, learning from my peers' mistakes.

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

What I just realized was that many people have personal accounts as well as business accounts but still I haven't seen an authenticator app yet that supports multiple user profiles. I'm still not sure what's the best way to do this, but I'd really love to add multiple profile support, so that users can separate their business accounts from their personal accounts, family accounts or even from their "leisure accounts".

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

I'd really love to hear back from users what they really think about my app. If they like my app, those 5-star reviews/ratings would really mean the world to me, but if there are things that should be improved, I'd also love to learn about them so I can keep improving the app. If they went that far that they would even recommend my app, there is a share button prepared in Settings for that purpose. :)