Why a timer wants your email
A surprising number of tiny apps make you sign up before they'll do a single thing. Here's the fair reason it exists, and the point where the account stops being for you.
You download something small. A timer. A converter. A calculator. You open it, ready to use the one feature you came for, and it asks you to create an account first. Email, password, maybe a verification link, maybe “continue with Google.” For a timer.
This is so common that it barely registers anymore, which is exactly why it’s worth stopping on. A tool that runs entirely on your phone, and doesn’t need the internet at all, is refusing to start until it knows who you are. Worth asking why.
The fair version of why this exists
Sometimes it genuinely does. If an app syncs your data across your phone and your laptop, something has to know that both devices are yours. That’s an account doing real work. If it stores your stuff so you don’t lose it when your phone dies, same thing. There are features that simply cannot exist without an identity behind them, and asking you to sign in for those is reasonable and I’d do it too.
There’s also a softer fair reason. A maker who can email you can tell you about a bad bug, or a fix, or a new thing you might actually want. Used with restraint, that’s a normal way to stay in touch with the people who use your work. Wanting a way to reach your users isn’t sinister by itself.
Where it stops being for you
The trouble is that most tiny apps asking for an account don’t have any of those reasons. The timer doesn’t sync anything. The converter doesn’t store anything. The account isn’t there because the feature needs it. It’s there because the business wants it.
An account turns an anonymous person into a known, contactable, trackable user. It gives the company an email to market to, an identity to attach behavior to, a “registered users” number to show investors, and a switch it can use later to make the free thing less free. Often the sign-up wall exists purely so that a thing which never needed your identity can start collecting it anyway. The cost to you isn’t dramatic on day one. It’s that you’ve handed a stranger a permanent way to reach you and a file with your name on it, in exchange for a thirty-second task.
As with tracking and ads, this rarely comes from malice. “Registered users” is the number the business gets graded on, and “make people sign up” reliably moves it. The fair reason (some features need identity) becomes cover for the unfair default (collect identity regardless).
What I do instead
My apps don’t have accounts, and the reason is simple: the features don’t need one.
A timer doesn’t need to know who you are to count down. A converter doesn’t need a login to change a file that’s already on your phone. So there’s no sign-up, no verification link, no password to forget, and no email of yours sitting in a database waiting to be marketed to, leaked, or sold with the company.
The limit this imposes is real, so here it is. Without an account I usually can’t sync your settings between your devices, and I can’t quietly back your data up to rescue you when a phone is lost. If a future app genuinely needs one of those, it’ll ask you to sign in for that specific thing, I’ll say plainly why, and it’ll still do everything it can without it. The rule: an account has to earn its place by making a feature work. It never exists just to make you reachable.
Everything is open source, so “this app has no account and isn’t building a file on you” isn’t something you have to take on faith. It’s in the code, with my name next to it.
