A lot of apps ask you to create an account before you can do anything meaningful.
Sometimes that makes sense. If you are building a collaborative platform, a multi-user service, or something that genuinely depends on shared infrastructure, accounts are part of the product.
But many apps ask for accounts simply because that became the default way software is built.
I’ve never liked that assumption.
Accounts also changed the incentives of many apps. Once an app has its own account system, it often starts collecting data that is useful to the business but not essential to the product. For some software, that may be justified. For many small personal utilities, I think it adds complexity without giving much back to the user.
Most utility apps are personal tools. They help you organize something, remember something, learn something, or create something. In many cases, the app does not actually need its own user system, identity layer, profile management, or backend-driven account architecture.
Apple platforms already provide a user identity through the device and iCloud account. For the kinds of apps I build, that is often enough.
Kurkum, for example, syncs recipes across a user’s devices through iCloud. There is no separate Kurkum account because I never felt there should be one. The app is personal. Your recipes belong to you. The system already knows who you are on your own devices.
Avoiding accounts also changes the feel of software in ways I care about. The app becomes faster to enter, simpler to understand, and easier to trust. There are fewer passwords, fewer settings, fewer user-management flows, and fewer moments where the software asks you to “join” something before it becomes useful.
There are tradeoffs, of course. Building this way means accepting certain platform boundaries. It also means intentionally not building some types of features. But constraints are often healthy for software. They force clarity.
I increasingly believe many apps would improve if they asked less from the user.
Not every piece of software needs to become a service.