
Ask HN: User friendly Captcha systems for mobile apps? - yonilevy
Hi,
I&#x27;m looking for a captcha solution that is as user-friendly as possible for a mobile app. Couldn&#x27;t find anything interesting.<p>Do you know of such a framework &#x2F; are you working on one? With the many sensors available i&#x27;m sure there could be interesting, user friendly ways to make life harder for bots.<p>It seems like the common alternative is to send a validation text message (makes it harder to spam), but that doesn&#x27;t seem optimal from a UX perspective. Would love to hear ideas from that direction as well though.<p>Thanks!
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simbalion
The best captcha system is no captcha system at all. You might take a look at
the Wordpress plugin 'WP Bruiser', which is extremely effective at eliminating
bot submissions, without any user interaction at all.

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pavel_lishin
Google's "Select all the pictures that are of flowers" seems like it would be
well-suited for mobile.

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yonilevy
That's a pretty good solution, but I can't find a way to ask Google for that
specific challenge (it seems to be bundled with other challenges that are web-
oriented). Is there a way to do that?

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Vexs
I think it auto-detects mobile, I've never gotten one that wasn't click-the-
flowers.

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dutra
What about implementing something in the likes of
[https://github.com/josscrowcroft/MotionCAPTCHA](https://github.com/josscrowcroft/MotionCAPTCHA)
? I think this would be user-friendly for mobile users.

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angryasian
On mobile is it necessary. I guess its most dependent on what you're trying to
accomplish. On mobile you have access to a unique id like device id or other
identifiers that are specific to a device.

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yonilevy
But how do you know it's not just a random string?

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angryasian
I think it depends on what you are trying to accomplish with the use of the
captcha.

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anthonys
Validation text messages can be useful and as long as you think about the
message (Ie. I can pull the notification banner down and see the numbers
rather than have to exit the application I am in), it shouldn't impact the
process too much.

On Android you can even read the message yourself. It seems iOS can do this
too but for now it seems on Apple can read verification messages.

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shthed
Can you use reCAPTCHA? Nothing easier than just ticking checkbox "I'm not a
robot".

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ahoka
As far as I know that check-box works by analysing the mouse movement when you
check it. I don't think that would work on a touch screen.

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rezashirazian
This may fall outside of what you're trying to do, but I always thought the
best form captcha would be to extend Uber to do real human to human
verification.

You send a request to a driver, the driver shows up and confirms the person
applying, completing or w/e is actually a person.

This can have potential legal/government related application.

