With the never-ending sea of apps and services that flood our lives today, we've all come across unnecessary little annoyances in one app or another. Lately, I've been noticing these more and more, and so I decided that it's finally time to publicly complain about them. To kick things off, I want to complain about Microsoft Authenticator, which recently annoyed me when setting up a new Android phone.

If you're not aware, Microsoft Authenticator is two-factor authentication app that generates security codes that you can enter to verify your identity. You can add all kinds of accounts to it, and I use it for a few of mine. That includes, of course, my Microsoft account, but also my Nintendo account, Facebook, Nvidia, and others. It's pretty handy to have these codes all in one app, and of course, you can back up this information to the cloud so you can set up Authenticator on another device and keep all your security codes with you.

So far so good, right? But there's a catch.

First off, you have to select the option to back up your account manually. Now, Microsoft does highlight this option in the app's menu, but this is also the company that automatically backs up a bunch of folders on your PC to the cloud, taking up significant amounts of space in your cloud storage (and yes, we have a guide on how to turn that off). Yet, for an app that is essential to keep access to your accounts, you still have to enable it manually. The priorities just don't seem right here. But let's be real, that's far from a big problem. I'd always look for this option anyway, and I suspect most probably would.

Restoring your accounts is made unnecessarily difficult

Here's what it gets truly annoying, though. Say you're switching to a new phone, as I did a few weeks ago. When you set up the Authenticator app on your phone, you'll see a big sign-in button, where you can use your Microsoft account to set up the app. As with any cloud-based service, you would think that's all it takes to restore your account. Like Windows 11 or Microsoft Launcher, you might see restore options once you sign in. But no.

What happens when you sign in with your Microsoft account is that your account is set up from the beginning, with none of the accounts you had linked before. And don't bother looking for a backup option, either. All you can do is create a new one — there's no button to restore a previous backup once you've signed in. You're just stuck there without your accounts.

As it turns out, there's a second, far less prominent button on the sign-in page of Microsoft Authenticator which allows you to restore a backup. And this is the only way to restore your previous accounts, even if you're using the same Microsoft account to sign in. If you sign in with the big blue button, the option is just gone. So what do you do? Uninstall the app and install it again, or go into your phone's settings to delete all your user data for the app so it starts fresh.

Now, you can argue that the button to restore a backup on the sign-in page should be easily visible, but who wouldn't reasonably expect that a cloud-based service where you use a Microsoft account wouldn't give you the option to restore a backup when you sign in with the biggest button in the app? Any additional buttons on the sign-in page should be for advanced features or troubleshooting, not the basic functionality the app should have.

It may be a small inconvenience, but things like this just eventually drive people away from Microsoft's apps, and lately, it feels more and more like the company is making stupid mistakes like this across a lot of its products. For now, I'm still using Microsoft Authenticator, but I wouldn't really recommend it to someone else. When you're setting up a new phone, it's already very time consuming to get everything up and running, and stupid setbacks like this just pile on the frustration.