Needless to say this has caused a rather large outcry in the community. For people who don't want the mobile app protection or for people who can't get it this means you'll have to wait a period of time before you can claim what you traded for and can't access anything you offered up in the meantime. The idea i'm guessing is that Valve wants to crack down on phishing and trading scams and by requiring another layer of Steam account protection they can perhaps reduce the number of trades that go against people's wishes. The problem is that they seem to be taking a rather restrictive measure to do so. As a result there's a few major problems here because of this upcoming system.'What is Escrow?', After a trade has been accepted by both parties, if either party's account has not been secured by the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator, then to protect against unauthorized trades, the traded items will be placed in escrow. During the escrow period, the items will not be available to either user. This allows users who have not secured their accounts to cancel any unauthorized trades and recover their items. Canceling all pending and in-escrow trades will place a trading hold on your account for a few days to prevent any further unauthorized attempts to trade away items.
First, both parties require having the mobile app to trade without restriction. If one does and the other does not this will lead to both parties having trade restrictions, even though one of them has done nothing wrong.
Second is that this will likely mean an end to trade bots. Trading networks that use a bot to bank metal or keys for instance will likely grind to a halt as these bots won't be able to have the mobile authentication and if they do an "unprotected" user could potentially cause the bot to fail.
Third, it appears the Steam Guard app is only available for Android and iOS. For people with Windows phones, old-school flip phones, or no mobile device whatsoever there's no way to activate this layer of protection and therefore you are subjected to restrictions for no realistic reason.
Fourth, while not apparent or anything, it seems like Valve could be trying to push accounts to use Steam Market instead which would mean they'd get a cut of the profits from transactions conducted over there (and moreso should it be from one of their own games like TF2 or CS:GO).
It seems like some details aren't clear and we'll have to wait until they decide to implement it but what do you guys think of this? I personally think it's being blown a bit out of proportion in terms of the community response but at the same time it sounds like they're taking an extreme option to combat scammers.