Apple Said No, So We Said Yes (To Anonymous Browsing)
Or: how a one-paragraph review note convinced us our login flow was a personality flaw.
The email arrived at 4:47 PM on a Tuesday, which is the most cursed time for any email to arrive. "Guideline 5.1.1 — Legal: Privacy — Data Collection and Storage," it began, in the tone of a dentist explaining that yes, all of them have to come out.
The reviewer's complaint was reasonable, even kind: users should be able to browse the catalog without creating an account. We agreed in principle. We just hadn't built it that way. Our app's first screen was a login wall, because we are software engineers, and software engineers love nothing more than asking strangers for their email before showing them a picture of beer.
Removing the login wall took an afternoon. Convincing ourselves that this was always our plan took the rest of the week.
Now anyone can browse 5,892 beers, 1,412 breweries, and 18 blog posts (including this one, recursively) without typing a single character. Login is reserved for the two activities that genuinely need it: rating a beer, and being an admin who deletes other people's ratings out of pettiness.
Thank you, anonymous Apple reviewer. You were right. We were wrong. Our gunicorn workers send their regards.