Using Google Authentication - via AccountManager - to access Google services on Android devices

* Attention *      This is a Work in Progress (WiP)      *Attention *

This post will cover the use of AccountManager (available in Android 2.0 and onwards) to access Google Accounts online.

It is a research article I am putting together mainly for my own use but my preliminary research revealed very few postings on the net, so I thought I'd keep it available online, so that it is accessible to more people as well as being a note board for myself.

It is possible to authenticate Google Accounts using HTTP requests but this requires the user to supply the app with both username and password, which is neither comfortable or convenient for the user. Using Google Authentication it is possible to use information already stored in the Android device to authenticate towards Google services without the Application needing access to username or password.

And authentication handled by AccountManager is handled in a generic way regardless of application.

I am performing this research in order to use it in my own Apps, primarily Analytics 4 Android (Free), but  hopefully general application in your instance should be fairly easy. Please feel free to comment.

In this article I will be citing other works. I may/may not have asked for permission to do so, but I am hoping that if You are an author and/or publisher of any said works will treat them as fair use. I will try to provide adequate attribution and reference for any works used. If You feel that I am violating your copyright, please feel free to contact me on janholbo(at) gmail (d ot) com.


References:

1. AccountManager (Android Reference material), http://developer.android.com/reference/android/accounts/AccountManager.html
2. AndroidAccountManager (google-api-java-client), http://code.google.com/p/google-api-java-client/wiki/AndroidAccountManager
3. Authenticating against App Engine from an Android app (Nick's Blog), http://blog.notdot.net/2010/05/Authenticating-against-App-Engine-from-an-Android-app

Links to be researched:

1. Android: Account Manager: Step by Step (Final Concept), http://www.finalconcept.com.au/article/view/android-account-manager-step-by-step-1 & http://www.finalconcept.com.au/article/view/android-account-manager-step-by-step-2
2. Android example source code file (AccountManager.java) (DevDaily.com), http://www.devdaily.com/java/jwarehouse/android/core/java/android/accounts/AccountManager.java.shtml

Other links:

The most beautiful Ubuntu Manual.

Muktware.com has released <a href="http://www.muktware.com/ubuntu-manual/1110">The most beautiful Ubuntu Manual.</a>

It covers the new Ubuntu 11.10 oneiric ocelot and it is targeted towards beginners and looks quite promising. It covers the basic areas and more will be added if interest is shown.

Preview of Google TV Add-on for the Android SDK

Preview of Google TV Add-on for the Android SDK - http://pulse.me/s/1ifb4

Ubuntu Studio 11.04

Having played a bit with debian, I decided to try Ubuntu once more.

And thankfully Ubuntu Studio have decided to stay without unity as the default workbench. So I installed 11.04 i386.

Installation was pretty much event-less except, that the WLAN (Wireless Network card) was not recognized during the installation process. I decided to skip the network setup and installed all the 5 predefined application categories; 2D/3D creation and editing suite, Audio recording and editing suite, LADSPA/LV2/DSSI audio plugins, Tone generation and editing suite, and Video creation and editing suite.

When the installation was done, the WLAN card was recognized and I was prompted to log on to one of the present wireless networks. Thus my screen looks something like this:

Next I ran the update process, as it did not run during installation due to the lack of network coverage. I also added Chromium (Google's web brwoser), and OpenJDK (an Open Source implementation of Java), which I need for Android development.

I also installed LibreOffice and missing UbuntuOne files. And I have forgotten all about MediBuntu, need those as well :-)

Next is downloading and installing the latest Eclipse Helios (3.6), which I also need for Android development as well as the ADT (Android Development Tools) and git for version control.

Switching from Ubuntu to debian

Having run Ubuntu for quite a while now I decided to upgrade to 11.04 with full knowledge of unity being the new desktop. I can see a lot of potential in unity especially for novice users and as such I do not denounce unity.

But for now I cannot get used to it myself. And so I decided to try debian yet again.

I started using Linux a long time ago installing Red Hat 4.2 on a Pentium Classic PC. Since then I have tried the newer Red Hat versions but I never went with the Fedora crew. I have also tried SuSE and arch for brief periods of time. And then I've been running Ubuntu since 8.04 up to and including 11.04. Oh and then I have a couple of firewalls runninf *bsd based pfSense.

But now it is back to debian 6.

The computer I am installing this on is an Intel Pentium T4500 based Acer Aspire 5738zg laptop.

As I had Ubuntu running on it and Acer uses 3 of the maximum 4 primary partition possible I had to erase the Ubuntu partitions before being able to create the necessary debian partitions. I would have liked to resize the Windows 7 partition to allow a little more than the about 100 GBs that Ubuntu had but because the NTFS partition was not 'clean' it was not possible. And as I had removed the Ubuntu partitions, grub complained that partition(s) were missing so it wouldn't even allow me to boot into Windows. So for now I will settle for this space.

Usually I have been shying away from the single partition scheme keeping /home on its on partition, but last time I partitioned I kept with just one giant partition plus the swap partition. This time I am going back to having seperate root and /home partitions.

I opted to let debian select the partition sizes, giving 3.6 GB to swap, 10 GB to root and about 86 GB to /home.

Unfortunately it seems that the debian installation is not able to initialize my Atheros based WLAN card properly, so it would not connect to my WPA secured wireless network.