Part 8: Customer accounts and a server

Buy your domain, give your app a server and a database, add sign-in with an email code, Apple and Google, keep data in step between phone and computer, and handle secrets, backups and privacy safely.

So far your app keeps everything on one phone. Lose the phone and the data is gone; buy a second one and it starts empty. This part gives the app a home on the internet: a server with a database, a place for pictures and files, and jobs that run every day by themselves. Then people get accounts: sign-in with a code sent to their email, with Apple or with Google, a face or fingerprint lock, and the same data on their phone and their computer.

Accounts bring responsibility. Three steps at the end are about that: letting people delete their account (the stores require it), backing up their data without ever looking inside it, and collecting less in the first place. One step is about secret keys, the passwords your server uses, and how to enter them so they never appear in a chat or a file.

The order matters. A Cloudflare account and your domain name come first, before any sign-in exists, because sign-in, emails and the links between app and website are tied to it. The steps use Cloudflare for the server, the database, the storage and the domain. It has a free level that covers a new app, and other services work too; each step says how to ask Claude for a different one. Nothing here is a copy of any real app's setup. Plan two or three days for the whole part, with waits for emails and approvals in between.