Phone lookup APIs can inform signup steps but cannot prove number ownership
A phone lookup API answers only a narrow question about a number, not about the person entering it. The article argues that developers should decide which signup decisions a basic lookup result can support before integrating one. Rejecting users whenever a lookup is inconclusive, or treating a lookup as proof of ownership, are both presented as design errors. A synthetic four-branch example maps normal, unknown, provider failure and OTP outcomes to caller-owned next steps such as continuing signup, review, bounded retries or an existing OTP provider. The author notes that unknown and provider failure results both should avoid automatic rejection, since they signal different problems that call for different handling.
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