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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T12:35:56+00:00

3rd party mobile app wants my google credentials, bad. but do they have an

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3rd party mobile app wants my google credentials, bad. but do they have an alternative?

I know about OAuth and I know that on the web, apps/websites are already ask users to login to their facebook/google/twitter/OID account and just get a token for authentication.

My question is:
1. Can mobile apps do the same (Android, WP7 specifically)
2. If the app is a RSS reader that wants to be the Google reader app (since three is no google app for WP7, a 3rd party made such an app). Can that app function as my google reader on the phone without me giving it my usrname/pswd?

It just seems way to risky to give away my google credentials to a random 3rd party app…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There are some attempts to use OAuth. Twitter has XAuth (I forget how broken it is, and it might still be in beta). There’s also Facebook Connect. They’re all broken.

    There are two main problems:

    • There’s no trusted UI except the web browser (and it’s not hard to write a similar-looking “fake browser”). Involving the web browser is clunky, and I’m not sure the browser can launch apps on Android.
    • There’s no accountability, because any app can pretend to be any other app. Any secrets you embed in the app aren’t going to be that secret. (I personally think this is more of a UI issue.)

    I can think of one half-decent solution: Have an official Google Account app. On Android, you launch it as an activity and it gives you an auth token when it finishes. On iOS, you’d do the same thing with URLs. I’m not sure how it’d works on WP7 or BB.

    This solves the first problem because the user is expected to be already logged in, and the second problem because you’re generally provided with some identifier of the app that started you. (Well, it solves the problem for users who don’t enter their password into random apps.)

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