195 angry reviews of authenticator apps: two of them are about price, seventy five are about being locked out

I went into this review pull expecting authenticator apps to be a story about paywalled backup. That is what everyone says, and it is wrong. Out of 195 low star reviews, 2 mention price. The mass is somewhere else.

Sign in and lockout: 75. Crashes: 25. Backup and sync: 22.

The lockout ones have a shape that would be funny if it were not the whole product. "It wants a code from the authenticator in order to sign in to the authenticator." People locked out of the thing whose job is to let them in.

Device loss is the other half, and it is worse. "Opened it in the morning with seventeen tokens and they were all gone, Service List Is Empty." "Phone stolen, broken, dead? You are finished."

Then the pile I did not expect and which belongs in this room. Reviewers describing seeds ending up in a cloud backup without a clear prompt and without end to end encryption, and one describing an app passcode that simply stopped being asked for after a delete and restore. I cannot verify any individual claim from a review, and I am not naming apps for that reason. What the pile does establish is that people cannot tell where their seeds are, and the apps are not telling them.

Which is a product opening rather than a complaint. In this category the thing to compete on is not features, it is a legible answer to "where exactly does this live, and what happens when this phone dies".