Google Authenticator

Like many of the other 1 star reviews for this app - I am unable to restore my tokens after doing a factory reset on my phone. Not all auth apps are like this. Authy saved my tokens and any sites for that app are fine. Anything that was linked to my Google Authenticator, I am trying to regain access to. I know Google isn't the greatest when it comes to technology but you would think someone would have thought of this.

Ive been using Google’s Authenticator for a while with no problem to access my exchange website account. Then I had to get my phone restored. Little did I know my saved codes were also gone too. Now I’m trying to log into my exchange site account, but lo and behold my codes don’t show in the authenticator. At first I was extremely furious at the exchange site for having this cost of massive inconvenience for the sake of security. Then I realized it’s probably this app that should’ve warned us ahead of time that after a factory reset, all our codes will be gone. For the laymen user, we don’t have the time to read the fine print and learn about stuff like this, and if it’s very important it should be easily told to us. So I’m locked out of my Account for days, but hopefully my account won’t be gone forever. Never trusting this app again, and may try out that Authy app to see if it’s any better. Very frustrating...

Authy is sooooo much easier to use. This app used to be easier to transfer to new devices and setup in 2012. Sometime since then and now (2/1/17), it's become incredibly complicated to set up and use. After app updates on my iPhone I had to re-setup some of my google accounts that required this Authenticator. My apps obviously required me to use Authenticator. But then my Authenticator also required me to use my google accounts! A bit frustrating but workable, right? Just log into my google account sign in and security settings on my laptop to setup my Authenticator first, right? WRONG. It's stupidly difficult to navigate through the labyrinthine security settings pages in google to find the passcodes or the QR image that I need to setup Authenticator on my phone. I couldn't find it. I even googled on how to find it and couldn't find the answers. This is multiple layers of Google fail. So I just gave up. Switched off 2-factor sign in and deleted this useless app, much to my disappointment and security downsides. Google really needs to simplify all the crazy complexity and cognitive bloat they are creating in their ecosystem of stuff. Their "material" UI design looks nice superficially but is in fact very poor UX - It's just all labyrinthine. Nothing is "obvious" and intuitive.

I normally don’t write reviews but since I use this app a lot for MFA it is not useful for multiple AWS accounts because you can’t change the name of an entry after scanning the barcode... you are stuck with the name the barcode gives you and if that account is AWS then it’s extra difficult. When you have several AWS entries where the only distinguishing thing is a 10-14 digit number that is not visible on the web login screen... once you set up multiple accounts you’re kinda stuck trying all of the TOTP numbers until one works because the names are not distinguishable and not editable upon creation. A simple edit to the account name is all I ask for. If that gets added I’ll change my rating. For now, it causes me enough extra frustration that I’m spending valuable time writing this.

(1/5 DO NOT USE THIS AUTHENTICATOR) With an authenticator app being developed by the likes of Google, you would think that maybe they would have an app like this in the bag. And it is! (sort of) This authenticator does exactly what you would expect it to. It provides a generic two-step authenticator in an app accepted by almost all platforms that use it. During my long use of it, I never ran into any problems with the authentication function itself. I did however run into an ENORMOUS problem when my phone unexpectedly and completely gave out to an internal part failure. All your precious passcodes are accessible only through that ONE device and not something like say, your google account... Personally, I had to lose access to several accounts and wait for direct customer service to regain access. Seemingly against all odds, considering only a few weeks of not have TFA enabled, an account was hacked. Granted, in the end this entirely started with a broken phone, I do believe that this app caused much more hassle than it should of. Considering all the things Google ties into your account, you would think something like an authenticator would fit right in. For better peace of mind go with another authenticator.

As basic and barebones as they come and for an authenticator app that's not a good thing. The most surprising thing about this app is that there is no option to lock the app so that it requires a password or biometrics to get in. What's even more dangerous as others have mentioned is that there are no options to securely backup so if you ever reset, break or lose your phone there is no way to restore. My suggestion is to use Microsoft authenticator, much better implementation and options.

I recently had to replace my phone on two separate occasions and was surprised to find the google Authenticator app data was not restored leaving me to scramble to get into the various accounts I secured with MFA. Be sure to securely save your codes outside the app (IE: 1Password, dashlane) so you don’t lock yourself out of your important accounts. Secondly, Google is a major advocate for security, and it is very surprising that the Google Authenticator app doesn’t allow you to secure access to the app in any form ( IE: pin, Touch ID, password). For the aforementioned reasons, I don’t recommend this app and have migrated my codes to Microsoft’s Authenticator app which allows the use of TouchID and seems to have some iCloud support.

Had a few services connected to Google Authenticator and one day when I went back to use it, it was like I had never used it before. It asked me to log in and set up new 2FA codes. As you can imagine, resolution to gain access to my accounts tied with authenticator took forever as all of those services wanted emails with proof that I owned those accounts. It doesn’t inspire confidence when your account can just disappear out of nowhere. This is probably a one off for GAuth but it was enough to turn me away and have me look at Authy just now. Thanks but no thanks. TouchID still lacking makes this feel like any other Google product that eventually falls off and loses support. If you’re concerned with your security and require a solid 2FA app, look elsewhere.

This is the worst app that I've downloaded. The codes are working, I never had an issue in activating the 2FA but now I can't log in because all the codes that I entered is invalid. I tried syncing the time for correction codes, made sure the time on my phone and on my PC are set in auto but it still provides me with an invalid 6-digit OTPs. No wonder why there are alot of negative comments here about this app.

I had managed to get this app installed on both an iPhone SE & an iPad mini. I had backups of both devices saved to iCloud & iTunes. Someone decided they “needed my iPad” more than I did. After a lot of thought I decided to buy another iPad. I brought the new iPad home & restored from the iCloud backup for the iPad mini. Everything looked good EXCEPT that there was no data for the Google Authenticator app. Nuts! I still have the iTunes backup so I repeated the process & STILL had no data for the Google Authentication app. Now I was getting annoyed but I wanted to have a backup authentication app so I restored the new iPad from the iCloud backup for my iPhone SE & still do not have a working Google Authenticator database on the iPad. I was able to recreate everything by toggling off 2FA on each account, toggling it back on, adding to my devices plus my wife’s devices & repeating for each of my accounts. As someone who has spent close to 50 years working with computers & value redundancy. I am not going through this again. USE OF THIS APP IS NOT RECOMMENDED!