I am writing a basic app that interacts with a webservice I’m writing using AppEngine. I was wondering what the repercussions are of using login based authentication and managing users individually on the server side.
I know the business benefits of knowing your users and since I plan to eventually have some user generated content in the service, I realize I will eventually have to add it.
Right now, I’m concerned more about the technical aspects of adding this feature. What are the development and maintenance costs of adding these services right now versus adding them at a later point in time i.e. when the datastore is already populated with some ‘anonymous’ data and not user histories are kept ?
I know this is a vague question so I’ll try to quantize the situation. Let’s say we have an app that allows users to search the surrounding area for restaurants. The app only needs to send to the service the type of restaurant, say ‘Chinese’ ? The app is popular and gets a 100k users. Now we want to add a favorites system. Would we have been better off adding it from the start or is it better to wait to get some user and then add features ?
An underlying concept here is also the value that users attribute to a personalized experience and it would be great to get some insights from experienced App developers.
It seems feasible to build your system from the ground up using an internal unique identifier to segment user data. To start, just use the device’s unique identifier to authenticate, then add a login-based scheme later.
I recently rolled my own api-based authentication system using GAE, and one of my biggest regrets has been not biting the bullet and doing it sooner. That said, if the context warrants (ie you want to test out a concept and see how well it resonates), I’d say you are safe going with an extendable approach, like the one I’ve described.