Posted by Niharika Arora – Developer Relations Engineer
From breaking information and leisure to sports activities and politics, X is a social media app that goals to assist almost 500 million customers worldwide get the complete story with all of the reside commentary. Lately, X builders revamped the Android app’s login course of so customers by no means miss out on the conversations they’re thinking about. Utilizing the Credential Supervisor API, the staff applied new passkey authentication for faster, simpler, and safer entry to the app.
Simplifying login with passkeys
Right now, conventional password-based authentication methods are much less safe and extra susceptible to cyber assaults. Many customers usually select easy-to-guess passwords, which unhealthy actors can simply crack utilizing brute pressure assaults. Additionally they reuse the identical passwords throughout a number of accounts, which means if one password is hacked, all accounts are compromised.
Passkeys tackle the rising concern of account safety from weak passwords and phishing assaults by eliminating the necessity for passwords fully. The function offers a safer, extra seamless sign-in expertise, releasing customers from having to recollect their usernames or passwords.
“Passkeys are a less complicated, safer technique to log in, changing passwords with pins or biometric knowledge like fingerprints or facial recognition,” mentioned Kylie McRoberts, head of security at X. “We explored utilizing passkeys to make signing in simpler and safer for customers, serving to defend their accounts with out the trouble of remembering passwords.”
Since implementing passkeys, the X staff has seen a considerable discount in login occasions and metrics exhibiting improved login circulation. With passkeys, the app’s profitable login charge has doubled in comparison with when it solely relied on passwords. The staff has additionally seen a decline in password reset requests from customers who’ve enabled passkeys.
In keeping with X builders, adopting passkeys even got here with advantages past enhanced safety and a simplified login expertise, like decrease prices and improved UX.
“Passkeys allowed us to chop down on bills associated to SMS-based two-factor authentication as a result of they provide robust, inherent authentication,” mentioned Kylie. “And with the benefit of login, customers usually tend to have interaction with our platform since there’s much less friction to recollect or reset passwords.”
Passkeys depend on public-key cryptography to authenticate customers and supply them with non-public keys. Meaning web sites and apps can see and retailer the general public key, however by no means the non-public key, which is encrypted and saved by the person’s credential supplier. As keys are distinctive and tied to the web site or app, they can’t be phished, additional enhancing their safety.
Seamless integration utilizing the Credential Supervisor API
To combine passkeys, X builders used Android’s Credential Supervisor API, which made the method “extraordinarily clean,” based on Kylie. The API unifies Good Lock, One Faucet, and Google Signal-In right into a single, streamlined workflow. This additionally allowed builders to take away tons of of traces of code, boosting implementation and lowering upkeep overhead.
Ultimately, the migration to Credential Supervisor took X builders solely two weeks to finish, adopted by a further two weeks to totally assist passkeys. This was a “very quick migration” and the staff “didn’t count on it to be that easy and simple,” mentioned Saurabh Arora, a workers engineer at X. Because of Credential Supervisor’s easy, coroutine-powered API, the complexities of dealing with a number of authentication choices had been primarily eliminated, lowering code, the chance of bugs, and general developer efforts.
X builders noticed a major enchancment in developer velocity by integrating the Credential Supervisor API. With their shift to passkey adoption via Credential Supervisor API, they achieved an:
- 80% code discount within the authentication module
- 90% decision of legacy edge case bugs
- 85% lower in GIS, One Faucet, and Good Lock dealing with code
Utilizing the Credential Supervisor API’s top-level strategies, like createCredential and getCredential, simplified integration by eradicating customized logic complexities surrounding particular person protocols. This uniform method additionally meant X builders might use a single, constant interface to deal with numerous authentication varieties, resembling passkeys, passwords, and federated sign-ins like Check in with Google.
“With Credential Supervisor’s easy API strategies, we might retrieve passkeys, passwords, and federated tokens with a single name, chopping down on branching logic and making response dealing with cleaner,” mentioned Saurabh. “Utilizing totally different API strategies, like createCredential() and getCredential(), additionally simplified credential storage, letting us deal with passwords and passkeys in a single place.”
X builders didn’t face many challenges when adopting Check in With Google utilizing the Credential Supervisor API. Changing X’s earlier Google Signal In, One Faucet, and Good Lock code with a less complicated Credential Supervisor implementation meant builders not needed to deal with connection or disconnection statuses and exercise outcomes, lowering the margin of error.
A future with passkeys
X’s integration of passkeys exhibits that reaching a safer and user-friendly authentication expertise will be achieved. By leveraging Credential Supervisor API, X builders simplified the combination course of, decreased potential bugs, and improved each safety and developer velocity—all whereas sharpening the person expertise.
“Our recommendation for builders contemplating passkey integration could be to reap the benefits of the Credential Supervisor API,” mentioned Saurabh. “It actually simplifies the method and reduces code that you must write and keep, making implementation higher for builders.”
Trying forward, X plans to additional improve the person expertise by permitting sign-ups with passkeys alone and offering a devoted passkey administration display.
Get began
Discover ways to enhance your app’s login UX utilizing passkeys and the Credential Supervisor API.