SwiftUI Experiments: Sign To Unlock

Exploring alternative app authentication solutions

I have been exploring building more prototypes using SwiftUI lately and I’d like to share them in these micro posts and talk about what I learned and share the prototypes.

I had an idea the other day on what are other ways to authenticate into an app. We currently have passwords, single sign on solutions and facial recognition as the more popular methods. I asked myself what would be another way to sign in. An idea came to me where it would be interesting if the user can use their signature as a way to sign in. My first immediate thought after that was it would probably not be secure at all. But for fun I decided to prototype it.

Here’s a demo from Xcode on how that might work running on the simulator.

I also ran the build on an iPhone to get a feel for what it would be like interacting with it on an actual device.

Overall it was fun to prototype this idea but as I mentioned before this method of signing into an app isn’t very secure and has accessibility issues. I also thought about the duration of this interaction but you can make the argument that entering a password might take longer so I don’t think the duration of this interaction would be an issue compared to alternative methods of authentication. I’ll still continue thinking of ideas and share it here.

Thank you for reading.