Two Fridays ago I wrote about my home-built password manager and while working well on a computer it was a pain to use on mobile. I’ve been trying to think of a more friendly way of supporting this on mobile and came up with the idea of retrieving the passwords via SMS. The workflow would be to send a text to a number with a search term and then get the password back as a response. Twilio made it surprisingly easy to build a simple proof of concept (GitHub code) and the resulting code is fewer than 50 lines and supports the use case.

There’s a fair amount of left to do - ranging from improving the error correction to dockerizing and deploying the code - but it works as is and I’ve been using it locally via ngrok. There are probably dozens of usability improvements I can make but the major one I noticed is that iOS doesn’t allow me to highlight a section of a text message - only the entire thing. This means that I need to tweak the Twilio code to send the response line by line. This will be a tad more expensive but cheaper than using a paid password manager. The other question I’m still trying to work through is the security of SMS.