Question

I have a website with a database of users. On the site, I ask for their name and email.

I am making an Android app for that website and want to keep track of the mobile users in the same way. Should I explicitly make them fill out a form on the mobile device if they are registering for the first-time?

If so, whats the best practice way of handling passwords in Android forms?

Answer 1

In android you have the option to make an EditText a password form by using the android:password attribute.

To keep the users logged in it would be a good idea to generate a key for the user and store that locally on the device (almost like a session key for your app “session”). So when you send off the username and password to your server your server script generates a session key for your app and sends that back. Then in the future your app can authenticate the user using that session key meaning you won’t have usernames and passwords stored on the device.

If they are registering for the first time there is no reason why you can’t get them to fill out a form on the mobile device. It is fiddly, agreed, but there’s no reason why it can’t be done. If there are any ways you can cut down the amount of inputs necessary then that’s great, but “Name”, “email” and “password” should be fine. You can probably get rid of “Name” and use the first bit of their email address (before the @) with the option for users to change/update it later if they want.