14 DAY TRIAL // This year's developer conference brought a slew of new tools for developers, and one of the coolest is the Account Kit, which is a universal login system that can work via phone number alone.
While managed email-based login systems have existed for a long time, and while the Facebook Connect feature has been available ever since 2009, Account Kit comes in to fill a gap for users who don't want to employ either of them and prefer to use their phone number instead.
Account Kit doesn't use passwords
Facebook's Account Kit will let app and website developers create products where users can sign up only with their phone number, no passwords needed, and without the developer having to write code that manages all the registration and subsequent login operations.
All of this is done via a special SDK, which app or website developers have to integrate in their services.
Users can enter their phone in a site's Account Kit-powered registration page, get a code on their phone via SMS, and voila! They now have an account.
The developer doesn't have to support special SMS-sending features on his part, and all of these operations are handled automatically by Facebook's infrastructure.
Facebook claims to support SMS login operations for over 230 countries and regions, and in 40 different languages. For starters, Facebook has assigned each developer a 100,000 free confirmation SMS messages per month quota.
Account Kit can be used by persons without Facebook accounts
Account Kit isn't limited to users having a Facebook account, which makes it more appealing right out of the gate.
This new service has already been tested in a live environment, with Facebook's Deborah Liu revealing that Saavn, an Indian music streaming service, participated in a beta test for the past two months.
The integration was a success, as Mrs. Liu has revealed that Saavn saw a 33 percent rise in new account sign-ups after users were provided with the alternative option of signing up with their phone number alone.
