Sign In With Apple: A Node.js Back-End Implementation for iOS Developers

Add Apple’s new login functionality to your app and server

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

One of the most interesting aspects of iOS 13 (the most recent major release) is that it gave us a tool to create our own authorization-based back-end servers for our iOS apps. Sure, we had “Sign in with Facebook, Google, etc.” before, but for an indie project, “Sign in with Apple” is a lot easier and faster to implement — both on the client and server side.

Let’s take the following scenario (based on my experience, of course): You’re an iOS dev who has a small app published under your own name. You want to add a server-dependent feature, but you either don’t have a back end yet or you have a simple back end with no user management system. Your feature requires user management. You want to persist specific items in relation to your app’s users. You don’t want to create a user/password-based system, you don’t want to manage JWTs, and you want to keep the iOS code to a minimum.

This is what nobody talks about. “Sign in with Apple” has been created with this specific use case in mind.

First, let’s make some aspects clear: In this article, we will not be talking about the iOS implementation. That has been covered in myriad articles and tutorials. It took…