Strategy Breakdowns
Posts
🎯 The ‘Sign in with Google’ moat

🎯 The ‘Sign in with Google’ moat

How a button became an impenetrable ecosystem

February 11, 2025

Read time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

There’s the strategies you see in the viral Twitter threads and the TechCrunch headlines.

Then there’s the strategies that quietly but decisively rewrite the rules of business.

Spent the last 7 days researching, analysing, and writing about a humble product that impacted our internet far more than it gets credit for.

— Tom

Build and scale your startup with best-in-class tools like Jira, Confluence, and Loom for $0 for 12 months with the Atlassian for Startups program.

Plus, learn from other founders on how collaborating on Atlassian tools help accelerate their growth in the Atlassian Startups Community.

AI-native CRM

Most CRMs were built for yesterday.

Attio is built for what's next.

Attio is an AI-native CRM platform built for builders of the future. Its powerful data structure adapts to your business model, scaling you from seed stage to category leader.

With Attio, your CRM builds itself in minutes through automatic data sync, which enhances your workflows with actionable data.

Then unleash the full power of the platform - from AI-powered automations that handle even your most complex business processes, to our research agent that can help with prospecting and lead routing at scale.

Join industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate, Modal and more.

Try the CRM that’s built for the future. Start Attio for free today.

_{Thank you for supporting our sponsors, who keep this newsletter free.}

The ‘Sign in with Google’ moat

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

If you’ve ever clicked “Sign in with Google”, you've compounded one of the internet’s most elegant and powerful ecosystem strategies.

Could probably complete this flow with my eyes closed.

It started innocently enough - Google standardising logins across their 1st-party products like Gmail, YouTube, Drive, Maps etc.

By spinning out this internal infrastructure into a public developer platform, they hoped to established ‘Google Account’ as the de facto internet identity.

But they weren’t the only ones:

When did this become normal
— Stevǝ (@Northvein)
6:41 AM • Oct 6, 2021

Despite fierce (and ongoing) competition from Apple, Facebook, Microsoft (incl Microsoft Account, GitHub, and LinkedIn) etc, Google has effectively won the ‘Social Login’ wars.

Today, ‘Google Sign-In’ is ubiquitous, from Spotify to Airbnb to competitors like Mozilla to your cousin’s GPT-wrapper.

Here’s how they did it.

💡

Strategy Playbook: Build a utility → give it away for free → harvest the data

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1. Win through convenience

Google recognised 2 universal truths about online identity:

Users hate creating new accounts
Developers hate building authentication systems

By offering a free, secure, off-the-shelf, and easy-to-implement authentication system, Google positioned itself as the obvious choice for both sides of the market:

For users:

One-click to initiate signup
No new password to remember
Universal 2-factor authentication
No ‘verify your email address’ flow
Notifications for any suspicious activity
Centralised tracking of app usage history
Consistent authentication process for all apps
Automatic profile population (name, photo, etc.)
No need to trust apps with commonly-used passwords
Automatic Sign-in when returning for subsequent sessions
Enhanced security options through Google Account settings

For developers:

App personalisation with user location, birthday, picture etc.
Decreases likelihood of fake or temporary email signups
Developer docs and community for troubleshooting
Free access to Google's security infrastructure
Reduced development time and complexity
Increased trust through Google's brand
Lower user drop-off during registration

By solving real pain points for both sides, Google silently became the internet’s default login experience for an enormous number of users and developers.

2. Create a data feedback loop

Each ‘Google Sign-in’ is a win-win-win scenario.

It provides value to (1) users and (2) developers, but it also gives (3) Google:

Data on frequency and patterns of usage
Insights into emerging platforms and trends
Visibility into which apps its users are adopting

This data feeds back into Google's core business, helping them:

Identify strategic opportunities (acquisitions, products, etc.)
Improve search/ad personalisation based on app usage
Track and stay ahead of competitive threats

By making ‘Google Account’ the gateway to the internet, Google created a network of 1st-party and 3rd-party cookies that give them unparalleled insights into internet activity.

3. Build an ecosystem moat

The beauty of ‘Google Sign-in’ is the flywheel it creates:

The more users who use it → the more valuable it is for developers
The more valuable it is for developers → the more developers who add it
The more developers who add it → the more valuable it is for users
The more valuable it is for users → the more users who use it

With each rotation of this flywheel, Google's position strengthens. Users become more dependent on their Google accounts, developers become more reliant on Google's authentication infrastructure, and the switching costs for both sides compound.

Even Apple, with its extraordinary platform power, has struggled to break Google's authentication dominance.

In 2019, Apple made it mandatory for all iOS apps using social logins to also offer 'Sign in with Apple'. Yet 3 years later, Okta (a leading Identity-as-a-Service provider) found that Google still commanded 75% of social logins, with Apple capturing just 14%.

Google solved the internet’s identity crisis, and created a compounding competitive moat in the process.

Rabbit Hole

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

How Chrome ate Internet Explorer ↗

[3 minute read]

If the ‘Identity Wars’ were about controlling the internet’s front door, the ‘Browser Wars’ were about owning the entire house.

Here’s how Google systematically dismantled Microsoft’s browser dominance.

The data behind social sign-ins ↗

[10 minute read]

Okta's deep-dive into login patterns across millions of users reveals Google’s complete dominance over the authentication market.

Plus some other interesting nuggets:

Why B2B apps favour different providers than consumer apps
The surprising growth of social login in workforce scenarios
How content and audience dictate social login preferences

Introducing Google+ Sign-In: simple and secure, minus the social spam ↗

[2 minute read]

Launch post on the ‘Google+ Developers Blog’ (🪦) fresh from 2013.

“Today we’re adding a new feature to the Google+ platform: application sign-in. Whether you’re building an app for Android, iOS or the web, users can now sign in to your app with Google, and bring along their Google+ info for an upgraded experience. It’s simple, it’s secure, and it prohibits social spam.

And we’re just getting started.”

Pumping this playlist while writing today’s article - hope you enjoyed!