Twitter just launched its phone-based password killer

Today, we got one more way to log into an app without a password. Twitter just publicly launched Digits, the company’s plan for letting users log into apps and services with just their phone and a one-off password. The effort stands separate from Twitter’s own app — insiders compare it to Vine; a separate but related product — but the interface will look familiar to anyone who’s enabled two-factor authentication to log into a Twitter account. The hope is that other apps will adopt Digits as a simple way to do without passwords entirely.

First announced in October, Twitter’s Digits comes as other “password-killer” platforms like FIDO are also hitting the market. It’s also part of a new push for more product development within Twitter, alongside a suite of mobile development tools called Fabric and a crash-tracking app called Crashlytics. “As the platform grows, you won’t think about Twitter as just the consumer app,” Twitter’s VP of product for revenue Kevin Weil told The Verge in October. “You’ll think about Twitter as a broader mobile services company.”