is true in my experience also. my tier2 and tier3 traffic the age verification kill them much harder than tier1, worse phones, worse camera, worse light for the face scan. for those geo i offer the id document or a simpler method, not the scan. is depend of the geo like always.
on the programmatic side i learned to treat the verification completion rate as a metric i bid against, not an afterthought. if a geo plus device combo passes verification badly, that inventory is worth less to me no matter how cheap the clicks are, because half of them never become a verified user. started capping spend on the combos with the worst completion rate, cleaned up roi more than any creative test.
the genuinely funny part is we spend all this effort on a flow whose entire purpose is to annoy the exact users were paying to acquire. no notes, just noticing. the multiple path thing is right though, a face scan as the only option on mobile is self harm.
this is a great point and exactly the kind of thing that doesnt show up in a dashboard until it costs you real users. in corporate wed call it a process boundary problem, two systems doing one thing to a user and neither knowing what the other did. mapping the states, verified, failed, flagged, retrying, as distinct, and making sure a user can always move between them cleanly, is worth an afternoon.
for anyone newer reading this, the takeaway isnt a vendor name, its a method. one, confirm which methods your jurisdictions actually accept. two, log which step loses people. three, offer more than one accepted path and route by geo and device. four, make the required step as clean as possible and keep a record of how each user verified. do that and the vendor matters a lot less than the sales calls want you to think.
small addition from testing, when you add the second method, dont show both at once, it confuse people and they pick neither. show the default method, and offer the alternative only after a fail or on a small link. i test this, a visible choice of two upfront convert worse than one clear path with a fallback. less decision is better here.
coming back to this world after some years away, the age verification requirement is the single biggest change to the signup flow since i left, full stop. back then the age gate was a button that said yes im 18. the whole discipline in this thread, logging steps, geo routing methods, keeping verification records, that is a genuinely new operator skill that didnt exist before. good thread to catch up on.