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BEACON TRANSCRIPT – Ever since the new Apple TV banned the use of your iPhone as remote, entering usernames, passwords – and pretty much any text at all – has turned into quite a pain, but Facebook may have come up with a solution.
According to recent reports, the company’s new SDK for tvOS apps allows developers to use Facebook for the login process; in order to skip the hassle and log in instantly, all users have to access facebook.com/devices via their computer or phone and enter a verification code.
It might not sound perfect – the process could be a lot smoother than what’s been offered here – but an app-agnostic system is the best we can hope for in the current iPhone-less situation. On the new Apple TV, logging in involves using the onscreen keyboard to enter a password, and it’s one of the screw-ups the company needs to fix.
This move is a good enough reason for Facebook to promote its own login system – which sounds like heaven for most of us. Even if there are plenty of users who don’t feel comfortable using Facebook Login as a viable alternative for passwords, the chance to avoid Apple TV’s patience-testing remote could be the necessary nudge to join the other side.
Evidently, Facebook’s SDK also allows developers to design their own sharing hooks into their apps, which means users will be able to post content to the social network. It’s an unlikely new platform for Facebook to start having a stronger presence, but it needs for the SDK to become more widely adopted.
And the process is simple: you just go to whichever third-party app you’re trying to log into, click on ‘Login with Facebook’, and then you’ll receive on your computer or smartphone a short code you have to enter.
One of the problems, however, is that the system heavily relies on developers adding support for Facebook logins in their apps, which currently isn’t a universal thing, and it’s not going to be any time soon. It also means that Facebook will crawl even more comfortably into our lives, which is surely one of the main reasons the company is doing this.
However, it’s a neat solution to a very annoying problem, and for that, people are most likely (begrudgingly) grateful to Facebook.
Image Source: Anandtech
