RentCafe Senior Living Portal

Passwordless update sacrifices usability

The passwordless update sends a 6 digit code to your email address. Yardi has not taken into account their audience. The average age of the residents at my facility is 84. It’s a major accomplishment for an 84 year old to even attempt to use an app on a phone or iPad. The previous password version recognized face-id and touch-id to bypass the password. This update recognizes face-ID and touch-ID, then asks for your email address to send the code to anyway. The password version had the capability to remember the email address. This version only has the Remember Me option on some units. It looks to me like on my IPhone 16 Pro, it gives me the Remember Me option, then immediately hides it under the Next button, so you never get the chance to set the option. Many of our users don’t want to mess with the app if they have to type in their email address every time. With 84 year olds, dexterity becomes a major issue. Some users get the option to send the code to their phone. I think that works on about 50% of our users devices. Again I don’t have that option on my IPhone 16 Pro. It is identified as a mobile device in the RentCafe master database. I have no problem getting a code on my phone for other apps. Trying to explain to senior residents how to switch to their email app, get the code and get back to the Senior Resident app, becomes a major problem. We are losing a lot of previous users of the app due to the loss of user friendliness in the current version. The app works pretty well once you get access, but many users give up before they get that far.

Rent Cafe Senior Living iOS App Vulnerabilities

I downloaded the Rent Cafe Senior Living app from the Apple app store. I can log into it. Significant observations: 1. It saves my password, but not to my keychain or to any other password autofill service on my device, it appears to be saved in the app. 2. The app underlines misspelled words in the password (spellcheck should not be checking password fields, app developer is responsible). 3. The app is not present in any of my Settings menus on my device which is a problem because those settings menus on the device is how a user manages the permissions granted to the app. This is a problem because a user needs the ability to modify the permissions granted to the app. I would never put this application on my father’s phone. Vulnerable software does not belong on the devices of vulnerable people, the elder generation is very vulnerable to cyber crime. Update per developer response: per the explanation from the developer it appears that the permissions may not have been requested by the app due to the login password issue as I had logged into the app and used it, the permissions should have been requested along the use pathways. Nonetheless, I am glad to hear the issue was finally addressed by Yardi after I notified my father’s property management company, RentCafe, Yardi, and wrote this app review 8 months ago. It wasn’t until I had some face to face time with one of the members of the property management firm who then escalated it within their company and back to Yardi that the issue was addressed. Seniors deserve security and privacy as much as the younger “iPhone generation”; more so in some ways. I’m still not trusting Yardi’s apps and software for seniors on my father’s devices.