1Kosmos Developer Experience

We hope to create the ultimate expression of a developer experience for passwordless authentication and identity proofing. The roles and responsibilities of developers have continued to expand in the last decade. It is now table stakes to include offerings for developers that help increase their efficiency and drive the adoption of new and existing authentication and authorization technologies. An IDC Survey from 2021 reports that developers are the architects and visionaries of digital transformation having a line of sight into the processes governing the creation of new digital solutions.

At 1Kosmos, our singular focus is frictionless onboarding and success in developer adoption. Our DevX offering is aimed specifically to empower developers to “bring your own use case” for passwordless authentication and identity proofing use cases.

There are many different ways of achieving a passwordless experience for end-users, and developers are faced with a myriad of solutions, services, and APIs to choose from when making decisions. One aspect that helps developers is simply providing good API documentation. Yet, unstructured documentation often proves a bigger obstacle to adoption in the long run. What is lacking is simply a developer experience of the API documentation.

This developer experience is what 1Kosmos introduced as part of the first DevX release in February 2022.

1Kosmos Developer Portal

The 1K developer portal is live at developer.1kosmos.com. Please go ahead and sign up!

Self-Serve Option for Developers

First touch and first experience are the first two points of call for developers evaluating the 1Kosmos BlockID platform. We have prioritized the implementation of our own technology for use on the developer experience portal! Our DevX platform allows for developer registration using a magic link sent to their phone or email. The developer experience is totally separated from the sales process – developers have the ultimate freedom to express their use cases while using the available APIs. Developers can sign in to the portal using a simple form and authenticate by scanning a QR code sent to their email address.

This release requires downloading and installing the BlockID mobile app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Soon, developers will be able to request a quick magic link to their email address to sign up for a DevX account without needing to install any mobile application. Logging on after registering is really simple. Simply scan the QR code from the Developer Portal and login.

After authentication, the developer is presented with a modern dashboard with all the information necessary to start using the BlockID APIs for authentication and identity proofing.

Defining DevX the 1Kosmos Way

We hope to create the ultimate expression of a developer experience for passwordless authentication and identity proofing.

We recognize that development is mentally taxing work. Passwordless solutions require developing authentication schemes that include advanced biometrics to prove the liveness of a user.  If we add the requirement to layer on identity and document verification from trusted sources to the list of solutions that developers must provide, what we end up with is a dire need to provide a set of experiences that help reduce the cognitive load of developing authentication solutions, while giving more control to the developer.

The focus for the 1Kosmos BlockID API Platform is to improve the working experience of developers, offering them a model to `Bring Your Own Use Case` and to choose from the various passwordless journeys available on our platform. We know that finding and retaining developers who want to adopt passwordless experiences for end users of their applications is a costly endeavor.  1Kosmos defines developer experience as the ability for developers to start from scratch and create an authentication journey using 1Kosmos registration, authentication, identity verification, and document verification capabilities.

Our DevX initiative has focused on first touch, first experience, first success from the beginning. The first release of our DevX portal is easy to navigate, makes it easy to try our APIs, and offers a sample application for the authentication SDK we call Universal Web Login. This enables developers to create powerful authentication journeys for their end-users.

The 1Kosmos DevX portal is a starter step offering API keys, tenant keys, API documentation, and advanced sample applications to trial those APIs. Our roadmap includes API-based journeys that will allow developers to put together any authentication use case they desire.

Abstracting Passwordless Complexity

The 1Kosmos DevX product and engineering team has chosen tools that allow developers to interact with our APIs, allowing for maximum flexibility and reducing the complexity of the myriad of passwordless use cases we know developers have to work with. In the same spirit, we also offer a demo application with all the bells and whistles already baked in for a developer to see and interact with a baseline implementation of our APIs.

We believe that our rich UX will allow for seamless integration with your development environment, giving you the option to switch between passwordless modalities while still retaining the correct data and expected functionality of your application. We wrote a sample application to demonstrate the use of a scoped QR code display that can be scanned by the BlockID Mobile application.

You can specify a scope for the session, or leave blank as I did below and start a new session with the 1Kosmos DevX API sandbox server:

Scanning this QR code from the BlockID Mobile App renders the authentication result object in the left menu:

SDKs for Java, PHP and NodeJS

To get developers to adopt our platform quickly, we created open source SDKs for Java, PHP, and NodeJS. These SDKs contain libraries and functions needed for secure communication between the BlockID Platform and the developer portal sandbox. They can be bootstrapped quickly using an API key and a tenant key that we create for each developer who signs up on our developer portal.

Discover the 1Kosmos BlockID Platform APIs

Visualize and explore our API specification using easy to understand API documentation that introduces the capability and guides a developer through the steps to implementing the API to support web-based and mobile-based authentication and proofing work flows.

All our API documentation is packaged to include a sample application with lots of examples of how to use and deploy authentication and proofing solutions with 1Kosmos BlockID APIs.

To wrap up this introductory blog, we at 1Kosmos are very excited about what the future holds for developer focused passwordless APIs and identity proofing for eKYC and AML use cases. With our Developer Experience release, we hope to have taken an important step in increasing adoption of passwordless and identity proofing APIs, and there is much more to come!

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