Your developer's phone should never be your login
Two-factor authentication protects your accounts, but only if the second factor belongs to you. When it sits on a developer's phone, you can lose access to your own systems the day they stop answering.
Two-factor authentication is meant to keep your accounts safe. A password alone is not enough, so a second step, a code from a phone or an app, confirms that the person logging in is really you. This is good practice and every serious studio should insist on it.
The trouble starts when that second step lives on someone else's phone. It is common for a developer, working quickly to get your site or application live, to register your admin account, your domain, your hosting panel and your payment gateway using their own mobile number or their own authenticator app. At launch this feels efficient. Nobody has to wait for you to set anything up. Months later, when that developer changes their number, loses the phone or simply stops answering, you discover that you cannot get into your own systems.
This is not a rare edge case. Small studios and freelance developers move between projects, phones and even countries. Contracts end. People leave the industry. None of that is a problem for you if you were never locked out in the first place, but every one of those events becomes a crisis if your accounts still depend on a device you do not hold.
Who should hold the second factor
The answer is simple. Any account that matters to your organisation, your domain registrar, your hosting provider, your email, your payment processor, your app store listings, should have two-factor authentication tied to a device and a number that you control, not your developer. Recovery codes should sit in a place you can reach, not buried in someone else's password manager.
A studio building your project should set these accounts up under your ownership from the first day, then use their own access only as a guest or a collaborator, with a role that can be removed the moment the project ends. If a developer insists on registering your infrastructure under their own credentials, ask why, and ask what happens to your access when the relationship ends.
A second factor you do not control is not security. It is a second password you have simply handed to someone else.
At Yunaristech, every fixed price project ends with a proper handover. Domains, hosting, admin panels and any related accounts are registered to you, with two-factor authentication set on your own phone or authenticator app from the start. We keep access only for the duration of the build and any agreed support period, and we document exactly which accounts exist and how to reach them.
Before you sign off any project, ask a plain question. If your developer disappeared tomorrow, could you still get into everything that runs your organisation. If the honest answer is no, the fix is not complicated. It just needs to happen before launch, not after something goes wrong.