4OTP and 4OTP Sync documentation

Thank you for considering 4OTP as your 2FA authenticator. We’ve worked to make it as easy as possible to setup and use but these few documentation pages should help you get the most of it.

What is 4OTP made of?

4OTP has 2 parts:

an application, referred to a 4OTP: it’s free and you install it on as many devices as you need to. It’s available for Windows, Mac, iPhones, iPad and Android devices. No account needed.
a service, called 4OTP Sync, that makes sure that apps installed on all your devices have the same data. So adding/deleting/changing a code on your phone is propagated to all your devices with a couple of seconds

Where do I start?

Install the 4OTP app on your phone or your computer:

Windows and Mac computers

Download the app from our Download page
Install as usual on your computer

iPhone/iPad and Android phones or tablets

search 4OTP in the App Store or Play Store respectively
or go to our Download page and click the link or scan the QRCode next to the link

First steps

Once you have installed and opened the app on a device, you will first be prompted for a password:

Select a password, type it in a second to be sure there’s no error and press Continue. On the next screen, you can enter an optional hint to help you remember the password.

Password

The password you enter to start using 4OTP on your phone or computer is NOT an account password. You do not need an account to use 4OTP. Even when syncing between your devices, your password is never stored on our servers, whether in encrypted or hashed form.

As your password is (nearly) directly used to encrypt your codes, there’s no Lost password feature in 4OTP. Your password is needed to decrypt your data and a new password can’t be set if you don’t have the old one.

Only you know your password and without it, you won’t be able to access your codes.

With your password entered, you’ll reach the 4OTP start page:

From there, you can:

Add your first code when registering to a website or service
Import existing codes from Google Authenticator, if you were using this application
Connect to 4OTP Sync to let it update your new device with codes already stored on your other devices

Follow the links above to learn how to import existing codes. Before that, you may want to configure 4OTP to your liking as it has multiple configuration options to adjust to your usual workflow.

Customization

All 4OTP configuration options are under the More button in the bottom toolbar:

4OTP bottom toolbar with More option highlighted

Clicking the More button opens up 4OTP configuration page:

4OTP configuration page with only headings visible

You do not really need to change anything to get started but here are the few things you may want to review first:

Access and auto-logout

Whenever you start 4OTP, it will prompt you for your password in order to decode the encrypted codes stored on your device and show them to you. After a few minutes of inactivity (10 minutes by default), 4OTP will “log out”, hides your code and request again entering your password before showing codes again.

You can configure both options under the Access and logout section:

On mobile devices (iPhones, Android phones, tablets), you can use Biometrics access control to skip the password entry step and replace it with just face or finger print recognition. You will therefore have the option to enable biometrics access:

4OTP Access and logout configuration section opened on a mobile device

On desktop (Windows or Mac), select a delay before triggering an automatic sign out.

4OTP Access and logout configuration section opened on a desktop computer

Language

4OTP should have picked up the language used on your device already, if it supports it.

If not, or if the selected language is not your preferred one, open the Display language section and pick one of the languages available.

Display options

Pick your preferred theme (light, dark or darker), an accent color or adjust the size of each code displayed on screen for instance.

More importantly, you can also disable the display of Next token or Code icons, to adjust the amount of information shown on screen to your liking