How OTP is helping the app economy?

Sandeep Ganguly

Smartphones were invented to make our lives easier. We use these devices for multiple purposes like making calls, sending messages, social networking, playing games, listening to music, etc.

Your smartphone is also likely to contain your personal photographs, credit card details, important contacts, bank account details, emails, and so on. In some cases, it may even contain your company data, if you are using your mobile device for official work as well.

If it falls in the wrong hands, this kind of data can often be misused. And the wrong hands could be of anyone – a known colleague or a thief or even a hacker. Any kind of unauthorized access to such data will expose your vulnerabilities, and the consequences could be unbearable! This makes it important for end users like you to prevent any security breach on your smartphones.

What difference does any security breach incident make to the application and the company that developed it?

First of all, users download or buy any application if they have heard good things about it from someone, or they have read good reviews about it on the app store. This means that they have placed their trust on the functionalities of the app, without worrying about the hidden risk of security, that it may bring along with it.

So, isn’t it the responsibility of your app development company to ensure the security of all the devices on which their app gets downloaded?

Any security breach makes users lose trust in the app and the corresponding company. Even if it is a small security breach, once users come to know about it, they won’t feel comfortable about downloading or using that app again.

And the impact won’t stop here. The users would find it difficult to trust any applications designed by your company in future as well.

Clearly, your company could potentially lose out a large number of loyal users. This is where your company’s reputation gets on the line. And it would prove really expensive to resurrect your company’s image.

Also, the cost to the app development business is even more after a security breach, for the purpose of increasing the app security.

Does OTP provide an additional layer of security?

This is why it is important to have an additional step of security in the form of the One-Time Password (OTP), that can be used for validating users and their activities on the application. Basically, it helps to verify mobile number that the users have registered with your app.

For example, when a user is about to make a payment transaction from your web app, your app can prompt the user with the OTP option, that would send a verification code to his / her registered mobile phone. What happens behind the scenes is that the OTP enables the app to verify phone number API and validate it with the verification code in real-time.

The OTP security method works great to verify the user identity at the time of, New Registration, Login, Changes to Account Settings

Payment Transactions, Password Reset, Login From a New IP or Unknown Device.

The biggest benefit of using this SMS verification service, where the OTP is sent to the user via a text message, is that it is extremely cheap to implement. And it helps the business to save plenty of costs that they otherwise may have to spend once a security breach happens. You may even get the verification code shared with the user via voice calling, instead of SMS. However, the SMS based OTP method is relatively cheaper to implement.

Secondly, it increases the trust of the users of the app, and it results in better app reviews and more number of users downloading the app. Thus, the use of OTP has the potential to give a major boost to your application development business.

And the demand for OTP is rising every day as application security is now a concerned identified by not only enterprises, but also by users. This explains the considerable increase in the number of OTP applications (or one-time password generators) being available in the various mobile app stores.

In a nutshell, the usage of OTP for applications has helped to build trust among users, secure their apps and devices, and it has provided a major fillip to the app economy in general.

The author is CEO, U2opia Mobile