Oh, Twitter...

I love Twitter, flaws and all. I don't think it's the greatest site ever made, but it's easily in my Top 5. Lately, though, I've been having a bit of a rough time with it. 

My Xperia Z Ultra has been great, even if I'm only using it as a tablet as my contract with Verizon won't run out for at least another month. To ease the transition, I culled a number of apps from my old phone, the HTC Rhyme. It had been getting a bit bloated, and many of those apps work far better on the Ultra. One of the apps I removed early on was Twitter. Technically, I still have it on the Rhyme, it's simply not the full version, but HTC's dashboard version, Peep. Peep works fine and dandy, but I didn't realize how stripped down it was compared to its big brother. 

I access Twitter primarily through Tweetdeck. It has its own separate login and account settings apart from my Twitter account proper. As for logging in to Twitter, I'd recently upped the security on it in light of some recent bouts with identity theft and set up mobile notifications. If I log in to Twitter from any new place, I have to enter a code that gets sent to my phone as a text message. 

What I didn't know until now was that when I removed Twitter from my Rhyme, I kept it from receiving those login codes. I figured that since they were only text messages, whether or not the app was present was totally irrelevant. Now, if I try to log in to Twitter through my browser (or especially the Z Ultra) I can't because I don't receive codes anymore. The solution seemed simple: put Twitter back on the Rhyme and get the codes. 

Guess what I have to put in when I open Twitter on the Rhyme. 

It's actually an easy fix, simply a matter of finding another way to log in, but it's so absurd that it's set up in this manner. I'm entering a phone number, not a MAC address, so why does the app need to be present in order to get a text message? What if I didn't have a smartphone, but an old flip phone (or "feature phones" as T-Mobile calls them, or "dumbphones" as everyone else calls them), like if I had to move my SIM card to another phone because of damage? What if the app got corrupted and needed to be reinstalled? For all intents and purposes, that's exactly what's happening now. 

There's nothing more frustrating than a security measure that works too well. It's like when your kid beats up the school bully: You want to give them a high five for kicking ass and not taking any crap, but you want to scold them as much for fighting fire with fire.