How can they migrate it to server without requiring login? The best part is that you don't need to create any user for playing. Accessing data between devices requires some form of auth.
I would assume almost all daily users of Wordle would consider having to have an account in exchange for persistent, cross-device statistics a worthy trade-off. And presumably a well-designed app could even abuse LocalStorage for anonymous play, and include a mechanism to hand off and save your data, should you wish to, via a login.
Social OAuth and passwordless email login (essentially one-time codes) are both pretty low-effort ways of managing auth without storing a lot of sensitive data or having to manage passwords.
Are those statistics actually interesting to many users? I barely noticed the move to NYTimes because I'm mostly just interested in playing the game once a day, sometimes sharing the result.
This might be one of those weird gamification things... but I don't think I'd care about my stats if they weren't there. But since they are, I don't want to mess them up by playing on multiple devices?
> I would assume almost all daily users of Wordle would consider having to have an account in exchange for persistent, cross-device statistics a worthy trade-off
Not for me, absolute deal-breaker. My fingers would find ctrl-w before the "Log in with Facebook!" modal finishes rendering.
To be fair, I think you're probably right. But, that doesn't make the article any more right to me. The argument wasn't that local storage is no longer a good choice, but that it's always a bad choice. Or at least that's how it comes across to me.
Many auth providers allow anonymous auth, which creates a UID that can be used to store and secure data. Only later the customer can link that account with another identity provider (e.g. socail, email/password). This gives the low-friction benefits of local storage and the flexibility of cloud storage.
I have found firebase to be a pretty good provider if you want something to get going quickly with. There are lots of others too, but it's probably got one of the more generous free tiers. But something to beware of is potential lock-in and loss of user privacy. Also, some of the free tiers are pretty generous, but then they hit a cliff and it can be expensive quickly. That could be a bad thing if you want to build a free app that goes viral. Also, not all of the providers also provide the cloud storage, so you might have to build/pay for that. Lots of drawbacks to this design choice that would not be suitable for a high user, free app run by an indie developer.
