Authy is fucking awful and no one should use it.

2025-08-12

Two factor authentication is pretty much a must these days, considering how often passwords get breached and leaked around online. It gives an extra layer of protection since it can verify that the person signing in is actually you.

Authy is yet another 2FA developed by Twilio, and it worked quite well for me for the longest time. I was quite happy with it, even after they decided to kill off the desktop app.

So imagine my fucking surprise (and anger) when I decided to reset my phone one day, and realize that Authy no longer works anymore. The reason? Twilio decided to fucking enable the Play Integrity requirement, which breaks the app on anything that is not a locked down phone with a locked bootloader. This truly pissed me off, since I had every single 2FA token saved on there, and losing access to Authy essentially meant losing access to those accounts where 2FA was enabled. I had to ask my sister to borrow her tablet to move everything to a better, non shit 2FA app, Ente Auth. It took me 2 hours to finish migrating everything to the new 2FA app and triple check if I wasn’t leaving anything behind. What a fun day that was (not). All of this because Twilio decided to enforce out of nowhere that they were gonna start using Play Integrity, for “security”. To add insult to injury, Authy doesn’t support exporting anything, which meant I had to go to every single account, unregister 2FA, reregister 2FA with the new app, and delete the entry off Authy. This took so fucking long to finish.

Play Integrity does not improve security or do anything that helps the user. It instead enforces control, establishing what the user can and cannot do with the phone they bought and paid for. Reading the one star reviews on the Google Play Store, I seem to not be the only person with this problem: many other users are reporting loss of access because of the new Integrity change, others having issues with exporting accounts, and others losing access to the app because they had to change their phone number (yes, Authy uses fucking SMS messages to sign you in, a notoriously insecure way to do this.). Great app, isn’t it?

would you trust a 2FA app with reviews like these?

Do yourself a favor and do not use Authy. It is clear they are willing to do changes without letting you know, and it is only a matter of time until you get locked out of your 2FA codes and by extension every single account that had 2FA enabled. Maybe it happens when you buy a new or used phone. Maybe you changed your phone number and now you can’t sign in. It is only a matter of time until the unfortunate happens. If you try leaving, they’ll make it as hard as possible to leave because of the lack of an export feature. If you are using Authy right now, might as well bite the bullet, unregister everything by hand, and then switch to Ente Auth, or if you don’t like anything that connects to the internet, you can always use Keepass if you so choose. Honestly, anything is better than the garbage fire that is Authy.