Twitter’s Digits project to kill passwords can now verify email addresses

SAN FRANCISCO — As many services continue to part ways with passwords in favor of what’s perceived to be safer ways of authenticating, Twitter is following suit. Announced at its Flight mobile developer conference, the company is enhancing its Digits login product to now accept email addresses. Instead of just using phone numbers, developers can accept email addresses as a means of accessing their service.

Twitter’s senior director of product Jeff Seibert said that when they launched Digits last year, feedback concerned how they could move past today’s email/password system to the future. Today Digits accepts email addresses, authenticates them, and then ports it back to users.

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Digits debuted almost exactly a year ago at the inaugural Flight conference. Today, there are more than 4,000 apps that are supporting this project. The intention was to allow users to onboard themselves to Digits-powered apps without needing to remember what login service or information they used. In a way, Digits tries to universalize the way we gain access to our favorite apps, using two pieces of information we’d never lose: our phone numbers, and now our email addresses.

Over the course of time, Twitter further evolved the product, first by tapping into users’ contacts to establish a social graph and then by leveraging voice verification and letting users easily update their phone numbers within their accounts.

At the beginning of this month, Twitter said that with Digits, developers saw an average onboarding success rate of 85 percent when users entered their phone numbers to access an app. It continues to promote that this login capability presents a more seamless experience.