Logging into any service on Apple TV is a pain. The text-entry field is one long line, and if you’ve got a particularly lengthy username or password for apps on the Apple TV, entering them can take much longer than it should.
Twitter-owned Digits is offering its own take on a solution with an SDK that tvOS developers can implement in their apps and let users type in a short string of numbers and letters that they get from their iPhone, rather than the full-on username and password combination.
This could solve the problem altogether, and it’s not much more tricky than using an app for Two-Step Authentication, which we all do now, anyway (or should).
Like a similar service already launched by Facebook, Digits will offer an authentication service that will show users a short alphanumeric code. You’ll just enter the code you see on your Apple TV to a webpage on your Mac, iPhone or iPad to authorize your login. The app will get your login info from the Digits system instead of from your laboriously-typed username and password.
Photo: Twitter/Digits
Developers will be able to add this code to their apps right now via the latest Fabric app for Mac, a modular app-making SDK that works with XCode, also owned by Twitter.
Let’s hope more devs get this or the Facebook system integrated soon — I’m very tired of typing on that Apple TV “keyboard,” aren’t you?
Via: Apple Insider
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
3 responses to “Twitter promises an easier way to login to your Apple TV”
To be fair, this is almost exactly the way you do log in to almost every app I have installed on my Apple TV so far. Very few require you to actually spell out your username and password. Apple could easily fix this by updating the darn Remote app.
The only app that worked like this for me is YouTube. Not HBO Now, Hulu, NetFlix, or Plex. Signing in with my Apple ID and my secure (meaning long and complicated) password was also excruciating. And then being asked for my Apple password every time I download a new app was dreadful – until I changed that setting to “Never ask for password again for App Purchases.” So much for security. This is not the pleasant Apple experience I was expecting. Makes me hesitate to try out new apps on my new Apple TV4.
Every one of the cable channel apps (Disney, History, NatGeo, FOX, and all the many many others) use the same on-screen code method employed by Digits.
What I’d like to see is a QR code appear. You then fire up the Remote app on your iPhone and snap the QR code. That then takes you to the login screen for that service on your iPhone, where you authenticate.