One of my recent deliverables on the Guichet Unique platform was integrating two recognised Swiss digital identities — SwissID and AGOV — as login options in the mobile application. In this article I share, at a high level, what these identity providers are and what it takes to bring them into a .NET MAUI app.
Why Recognised Digital Identities Matter
Public services have a hard constraint that consumer apps don't always share: they need to know, with confidence, who is on the other end. Rolling your own accounts and passwords for a government platform is the wrong answer — it is a security liability and a poor experience.
The better approach is to delegate authentication to trusted, nationally recognised identity providers. That is exactly what SwissID and AGOV offer:
- SwissID — a widely used digital identity in Switzerland, already accepted by many public and private online services.
- AGOV — the Swiss authorities' login service, designed specifically to give citizens secure access to government online services.
Supporting both means citizens can sign in with an identity they already have and trust, instead of creating yet another account.
Bringing Them into a MAUI App
The Guichet Unique mobile app (GuMobile) is built with .NET MAUI, so the integration had to work cleanly across both iOS and Android from a single codebase. Without going into sensitive specifics, the work centred on a few familiar pillars of modern authentication:
- Standards-based sign-in flows that hand authentication off to the identity provider and bring the user safely back to the app.
- No user credentials kept in the app at all — authentication is fully delegated to the identity provider, so passwords no longer live on the device.
- A consistent, trustworthy login experience whichever provider the citizen chooses.
A good chunk of the effort in this kind of integration is in the details that users never see: handling the round-trip back into the app reliably, dealing with cancelled or expired sessions gracefully, and testing the flows thoroughly on real devices.
The User's Perspective
When it all comes together, the result is almost invisible — and that is the point. The citizen taps "Sign in with AGOV" or "Sign in with SwissID", authenticates with an identity they already manage, and lands back in the app ready to use government services. No new password, no extra account, and authentication handled by providers built for the job.
Conclusion
Integrating SwissID and AGOV is a small piece of a bigger picture: making Swiss public services genuinely usable on mobile while keeping the security bar where it belongs. Leaning on recognised digital identities is the right foundation for that — better for security, and better for the people using the app.
You can find the Guichet Unique app on the App Store and Google Play, and read more about my work on the Guichet Unique project page.