Cynically I wonder if it's because the people using GitHub/Vercel aren't the ones buying it, so there's nothing lost by shuffling them along to the dashboard...

Of course the stuff behind the login and auth is way better than it was in 2007! The crazy part is that actually getting through the front door has gotten so shitty.

Who asked for this?!? I'll tell you who asked for this: the depraved gremlin whose comp is based on 'engagements' on that stupid fucking video.

(OTOH, consider Vercel or GitHub. If you're logged in, they take you to their dashboard, not their marketing page. It's such a relief. So humane. )

Look at Shopify. To manage your store, you go to Shopify.com, then tap Login. You're already authenticated! They could just redirect you!

BUT IF THEY DID, they couldn't force you to watch a full-screen video of some shrub using Shopify to dropship ocean plastic to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

2. Auth is now owned by psychopathic product managers.

Web 2.0 signup forms were made by whimsical hipsters who spent their off-hours rounding corners and inventing new ways to gatekeep coffee.

Now they're made by Gordon Gecko. Forms aren't for YOU to USE – they're for THEM, and their petty KPIs.

(NB: The 'stay logged in' option is a LIE put there by LIARS.)

It was STOLEN from us though:

1. Auth is ridiculously complex (passkey? 2fa? OAUTH?). It's SO complex that even the biggest companies in the world can't make it work.

Every service I use - CloudFlare, AWS, RevenueCat, App Store Connect - logs me out daily. Logging in is 3 or 4 SLOW screens.

The first product I saw like this was Campfire (37signals circa 2007), just as IE6 was dying (not a coincidence).

I signed up and realized until that moment, I had never truly seen a form. It was a golden age of auth UI!

Going on the defensive in a Reddit thread never works, but as an act of self care, I redid my privacy policy to be even more explicit penbook.app/privacy-policy

So I trimmed my label:

🪪 Identifiers: Clearly the UUID I generate to enable purchase restoration is not what users think of when they see this. DELETED
📊 Usage: My 'usage' falls under Diagnostics so → delete
🛍️ Purchases: Decided there's no way this can mean 'upgrade subscriptions'. Baleeted

NB: Some users referred to the nutrition labels as 'Permissions', like on Google Play app display pages.

If users think these labels are assigned by Apple, and that they're based on what your app does and not self-reported, it explains a lot!

Users interpreted these labels as...

🪪 Identifiers: automatic collection of their email, phone number...
📊 Usage: 'No privacy for notes' (i.e., I spy on their work)
🛍️ Purchase history: I track ALL their purchases (not just Penbook's IAPs)

(⚙️ Diagnostics got a pass)