Hey, Mobile! Let Me Change My Password!

Yesterday, my son’s iPhone 4 was stolen, which raises a cluster of inconveniences. Replacement cost, of course, is non-trivial. The pains don’t end there, though. He was planning to hold out for the iPhone 5, assuming it would be released in the fall, and now must decide whether to squander his upgrade price on a 4S (and put the future 5 out of reach), or limp along with a Hanging-With-Friends-less flip phone for 10 months or so.

This morning required extra planning as well. My son uses his phone as his alarm clock. In a striking example of “knowing thyself,” he has about 10 alarms set to go off every morning, starting at 6 AM and firing every five minutes. That’s what it takes for him to shrug off slumber and senioritis sufficiently to shuffle off to school (and, judging from attendance rolls, even that is only 70% effective). Without his phone, he had to rely on us, as his parents, to summon Hercules to roust him this morning. As I write this, I have no idea if he made it to school for his two exams today.

On his phone, as most of us do, my son has applications that are logged in to their respective services, so he had some work to do last night to change all his passwords. In a bit of frustrating bad luck, our Internet connection at the house is currently down (note: if you move your AT&T home phone to a cell phone, and they tell you your DSL service won’t be affected, don’t believe them. And who knows why it takes a week to restore it). Consequently, he had to use my iPhone to change his passwords.

Guess what: it’s not possible to change all your passwords from your mobile phone.

He started with Facebook. After poking around the native app to find anywhere to change his password, he finally gave up and logged in to the mobile site. Some more poking revealed a place to change his password. Paydirt after 10 minutes.

Then he went to Twitter. He tried Tweetbot, Twittelator Neue, and the Twitter app. None of them offered anywhere to change his password. He tried the Twitter site, but evidently they were beached by a fail whale because only a blank screen would show. His Twitter account, as of right now, is still exposed.

Then he went to change his Yahoo! mail password. For the iPhone, Yahoo! mail offers two interfaces: the new mobile-optimized one and the old mobile-optimized one. Apparently, whatever the generation, “mobile-optimized” means “if you want to change your password, go find a desktop.” That password still hasn’t been changed.

Surprisingly, I think that’s the extent of his exposure. Most of us on Pinterest, Path, Quora, Github, or others would still be trying to find where to change passwords in their respective native apps or mobile sites. Designers and developers: give us a way to change our passwords from our phones! And distrust any emails you get from my son for the next little while–I mean, more than you normally do.