I haven't found anywhere in the Google's Android Management API any alternatives to using Google Cloud as its backend.
For users who have hard requirements against using Google Cloud or if it's unavailable in your physical location, does Google provide alternatives?
For context, Apple's take on this is that infrastructure is provided by the user itself and there is no "middle man".
The alternative option that Google provides is the use of Google Play Console. It allows users to use 3rd-party identity service by linking managed Google Play Accounts with the user’s existing identity accounts.
Also, since this is not tied to a user’s existing domain, creating more than one Enterprise for a single organization is possible.
Please refer to this link for additional information regarding this matter.
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I am new to Android app development and have a few questions.
Suppose I want to create an app that has user login. I want to authenticate the users over the internet. Where should I collect and store all the user accounts and their credential information? Will this storage be free or paid?
Can I integrate Google Sign-in in my app for free? Where should I store the google sign-in account information of all the users?
Is it possible to integrate Google sign-in and backup the app database (.db files etc.) and other user settings to the user's Google Drive (for later recovery when app is reinstalled)? Is this free or paid?
Answering Questions 1 and 2:
There are a few options:
1) Firebase:
If you only want to work on the mobile app, not on the backend software, the easiest way is Firebase.
Firebase has built-in support for Google authentication and you can follow the tutorials provided by Google here, and the samples here. (I`m using the link because the code is too big to paste here on the answer.) The authentication service is free.
2) Self implementation:
You can use Google sign in API on this example and implement the server side if you have a backend team or want to do it yourself.
About Question 3 (Google drive), users can use their own Google account to store applications backups, and you can select what application files will be stored. In this case, they will consume their free Google Drive quota, and thus the service will be Free.
Google provides an API for that, and you can have have a look on this example here. (Notice that Google had deprecated Google Drive Android API on December/2018. But the example on the link shows what you have to do on the newer way, using Drive REST API).
There are other approaches and solutions but I tried to give you the simplest and cheapest ones.
I want to use Google Authenticator as one of the security lock in my application. I want to know if there are public APIs available to use Google Authenticator for this purpose. It's a non-google android application which does not need a google account.
Thanks & Regards,
Sure you can. You don't need APIs, the Authenticator is completely open source, and doesn't need to talk to Google servers. There's also a convenient PAM if you're doing straightforward auth. Essentially, you need to get a secret key from the auth module that you enter into the phone app, and you're good to go.
See here for an example of using it to second factor ssh.
is there any way to give access to the statistics of a specific app on my google play developer account to a 3rd person?
I have various apps, one of them is developed for a customer and he asks access to the downloads and rest statistics.
At present, Google Play does not provide mechanism to enable access to a specific app alone, although you could give access to your whole Developer Console. The only thing you can restrict is the financial information. I hope this is not what you want.
In your case, you could provide screenshots if that is acceptable.
I ended up to use a google api to retrieve the statistics and create my web front end to show them to my customer.
You can find at http://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/ a php version of the backend.
kudos to this post too: Is there an API to get statictics on Google Play developer console?
As far as I concerned, there is now way to give access to statistics only to 3-rd person, besides giving him your account information. For my personal usage, I developed a widget for tracking some statistics of my application and eventually I released it on the market. So I think it will be helpful to you as well Applications Tracker Widget is the app which will help you
My company would like me to manage paid Android applications in Android Market but not have access to the linked google merchant account. This is a very reasonable request but there seems to be no way to accomplish this. According to google docs the same google account must be used for the market and merchant account therefore if I have access to one then I have access to the other.
How do other corporations deal with this? Am I missing something?
If the company uses google-apps (see here), it can create an account for you and revoke/grant the particular service.
Google accounts come with a pretty nice profile already, and since all Android phones connect to that profile for most of the google services. I'd like to add an option to my application to simply register with my application using your google profile on the phone. Not only would I have access to information like email address, name, aliases, but also profile images people use on google services.
Which Google API provides me access to that? Is there something in the Android API's that already provides this that I'm missing? I'm not just looking for authentication, as with OAUTH, but access to the profile information as well.
Are there any existing libraries I can use?
Turns out there is a way to get access to the google profile(s) the user has:
http://code.google.com/p/google-api-java-client/wiki/AndroidAccountManager
That's awesome.