Using Android AccountManager for 3rd party OAuth2 authorization

Question

I am working on an app that will need to get authorization via OAuth2 from a 3rd party web service (3rd party meaning it's not Google and I don't own it).

This article:

http://developer.android.com/training/id-auth/authenticate.html

seems to suggest that I should be using AccountManager for this purpose. After giving this some thought, I have some doubts about the benefit of doing this, or even if it's appropriate for me to do this. If I wanted to use a Google account, or some other account that was already installed into AccountManager by some other app, then obviously it would be a good idea to get the credentials from AccountManager. But since I am going to use an account that is most likely not in AccountManager, I would have to do all the work to get it installed.

Does AccountManager provide any support in actually handling OAuth2 requests? If it doesn't, then what do I gain by using it?

And since I don't own the web service associated with this account type, is it even appropriate for me to be installing such accounts into AccountManager?

Thank you!

Phagocytosis

Answer 1

This might be a rather late answer after all these 4 years, but let me give you a short reply.

You cannot and should not be installing third-party accounts for Oauth yourself. It is the job of those third-party OAuth providers such as Facebook or Twitter to implement AccountManager functionality and create their own account type. This is roughly guided at https://developer.android.com/training/id-auth/custom_auth.html.

There are several services, including OAuth providers such as Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, and etc, who register user accounts in AccountManager but I believe most of them just use it to implement SyncAdapter (which requires Account), not to provide OAuth functionality to third-party applications like your app.

I think Google allows you to use their APIs using the token acquired through AccountManager; the link you provide gives an example of using AccountManager for Tasks API. However, using the client library is a better option of achieving the same thing as described in https://developers.google.com/google-apps/tasks/quickstart/java#step_3_configure_the_project_build.

If the third-party OAuth provider does not provide you any SDKs or client libraries, you have no other choice but to use REST APIs they provide.

Uhland

While posting your answer four years late, it was immediately helpful to me, who finds himself in the same situation as the OP, and was failing in his Google-fu to find an answer to the question (do I go through AccountManager api, or do oauth2 on my own, etc.). Thank you for posting. – Floating