Risk Complete Failure

The new Google Sign In SDK for iOS is out! With a new version number, and separated from the old Google+ SDK, the Sign-In SDK should make it easier and faster to implement Google Sign-In in your app. Lets take a look at how to use it from Swift.Unfortunately the library isn't available from Cocoapods yet, so you'll have to drop it in manually. Setup is pretty easy: add in the GoogleSignIn.framework from the zip download and add the system AddressBook and SystemConfiguration frameworks. If you want to use the supplied button, you'll also need to add the GoogleSignIn.bundle from the SDK zip which contains the fonts, images and translations for the standard button - using the Add Files to "project" menu option should automatically set it in the Copy Bundle Resources part of your build step.If your sign in button is invisible when you launch the app, you probably haven't copied the GoogleSignIn.bundle from the SDK zip file.In the Build Settings phase, add -ObjC i…

The release today of version 1.7 of the Google+ iOS SDK added the ability to authorise both a client and server for access to Google APIs. This has been a feature for Android and Web based sign-ins for a while, and now is available across all three platforms. This should simplify server side code for people who have been building cross platform apps - for example if you need to retrieve profile information on the client, but retrieve circles on a server for a friend finding feature.The implementation for iOS is fairly straightforward. When setting up authentication, simply specify the client ID of your server on on the GPPSignIn object. This should be a client ID from the developer console which is used by your server-side code, and should be part of the same console project as your iOS client ID. For those that have done it, this is the same parameter used when retrieving an ID token:You can see that the first part of the client ID (the project number) is the same, but the other par…

These days there are few purely client-side applications - even traditionally unconnected software like casual games make use of servers and services to provide a better, richer experience - and importantly one that can follow the user across devices. We are in a world where we need to authenticate a user of many clients to a set of back-end services. There are a few ways of doing that when using a identity provider, like Google, but in this post I want to talk about a specific method that makes use of ID tokens. This approach has been well covered by Tim Bray for Android, but with the release a couple of months ago of the iOS 1.4.0 SDK for Google+, it is now available across Android, iOS and the Web. This makes it a particularly powerful way of signing in a user, and asserting the identity of that user securely to your application servers. Why ID TokensThis whole architecture relies on a point of view which I suspect is still not particularly common amongst developers implementing au…

One of the questions that you face as a developer when implementing Google+ Sign-In (or any login method) is how to present the options to the user. Having reviewed a pretty large number of apps with sign-in, I thought it might be helpful to break down the four main approaches for displaying the buttons that I've seen, and some thoughts on the costs and benefits of them. A couple of points before we get into that: It's worth remembering that the best situation is when the user does not have to take any action at all. That's the idea behind cross platform single sign on and over-the-air installs. It's also why it is worth taking the time to make sure users stay signed-in after an app upgrade or releasing a new version of a website.Secondly, unless there are solid reasons not to, sign-in should always be paired with sign-up. Particularly on mobile devices this can be a missed opportunity where users are expected register on the web first. That said, in this post I want t…

There have been some interesting things happening with Google Analytics that have made it even more useful for developers recently. The Google Play team announced that you can now track app install referrals using Analytics, and on the web side the Analytics team have started rolling out Demographics and Interests information.Demographic data is a great way of getting a view of how the usage of your web app varies with the age or gender of the person using it. This is powerful, but it got me thinking about how you might do the same thing within a mobile application. Some of the same information is actually available via a user's Google+ profile. By integrating Google Analytics into your application you can get measures of the usage of various parts of the app, and by grabbing the age range and gender from Google+ Sign-In you can look at how the different flows break down by the demographics of your users!Setting up Google AnalyticsThis is done through use of a feature called Custo…

I previously mentioned how easy it is to deep link straight into the Google+ app on iOS, to view a user's profile or similar, using the gplus:// scheme and UIApplication openURL. This sort of integration is pretty much the only way to do general inter-app communication in iOS (bar the new audio APIs), and several other Google apps offer their own URL schemes which let you make very straightforward integrations.Mostly these are ways of giving users a slightly smoother experience when entering the app, but one allows you to do a little bit more!Google MapsWith Google Maps, you can specify coordinates to focus on, a search to perform, or two locations to ask for directions between. All the parameters are documented on the maps site. As a simple example, searching for pizza near me looks like this:GmailWith Gmail you can go straight to the compose screen and specify the to and the subject line, just like with web mailto:// addresses. This can be good for email options in case users do…

I'm really happy to see the release today of version 1.4.0 of the iOS Google+ SDK. It's worth a look, in no small part because the team have fixed one of the longest standing requests for the SDK: the ability to share to Google+ without the user leaving the app. In previous versions of the SDK, the only sharing option was via the mobile browser, so the user would be switched out of then back into the app they were using. This release puts the share box fully inside the app for signed in users, and has also given it a bunch of new special powers for better sharing. All of the documentation on the Google+ iOS developer site has been revised and improved, but I wanted to highlight my favourite parts of the release here as well.Native ShareboxThe new share box is a smoother way for users to share from within your application to Google+. The existing share box that calls out to the browser and back is still available for anonymous users, but if you're implementing Google+ Sign-…

One of the nice things about working in developer relations is I get exposed to an awful lot of code written by an awful lot of different people, which means I regularly encounter techniques I haven't seen before. I wanted to quickly post on one that is possibly very familiar to iOS developers, but that I only saw recently - though I have to say that for readability's sake I would recommend some good commenting if you do decide to use it!The code came from an iOS codelab for the excellent Google Play Games service, written by the mighty Kerp. The code was a header file doing something pretty normal: defining a list of constants for use in game. What was a little unusual in that it had the values both declared and defined in the header, and that there seemed to be some business with macros occurring.This took me a little bit of parsing! In general the normal way of defining these sorts of constants in Objective-C is to have an extern'd definition in the header file, and the…

Had a couple of questions recently about Google+ Sign-In in different languages. While its rather common to want to use custom graphics instead of the supplied sign-in button, one of the nice benefits of using the supplied buttons on Android, iOS and the web is that they automatically adapt to the language of the user. Pretty much this post could end there, but there are a few interesting edge cases that are worth mentioning.JavascriptOn the web the Javascript Google+ buttons will attempt to choose the language based on the browser settings. This should be (mostly) fine, but if you have a specific user setting for language you can output some configuration to force the language for all buttons (including the sign-in, +1 and so on).These kind of global parameters are generally configured in the ___gfg property of the window, which the Google Javascript API checks when it loads. You'll need to put the following before (or in the same script tag where you load the Javascript:Which lo…

With everyone's hearts all a-flutter over the prettiness of iOS 7 from WWDC, I thought it would be a nice moment to summarise some potholes I've seen people trip over while implementing Google+ Sign-In on iOS. While overall it's pretty straightforward, there are some things that can make life a little tricky. However, for reference I've also put up a simple gist of a sign-in implementation that includes an AppDelegate and a ViewController with the sign-in button on.In this case though, we'll take a look at some problems that might bite you during development, and some that might hit later on.Forgetting the resource bundleWhen you include the Google+ iOS SDK, you need three files: GoogleOpenSource.framework, GooglePlus.framework, and GooglePlus.bundle. If you forget the frameworks you're likely to get a big obvious compile error about not being able to find the classes you want to include, but the bundle can be a bit more subtle. It contains the translations for…

While setting up your application to receive deep links from the Google+ apps on web, Android and iOS is prettywelldocumented, it's not necessarily obvious that you can deep link into the Google+ apps on Android and iOS.On Android, the Google+ app registers intent filters for (most of)the regular http://plus.google.com/* URLs. From version 4.4 of the Google+ iOS app, it also registers (again, most of) the web URLs, but with the custom gplus:// scheme. If you're reading this on one of those devices right now, you should be able to try these out.View my profile (Web/Android), View my profile (iOS).Go to a community (Android/Web), Go to a community (iOS)Actually using these from your app is straightforward:On Android, the easiest way of starting out is to just fire an intent for the desktop URL, which the Google+ Android app registers a filter to handle:However, because we're using a regular web URL, the default action will be to give us a chooser, which is probably not the i…

Google I/O was pretty busy for Google+ all round, and that includes from the point of view of anyone developing on iOS: we had (at my count) at least 25 iOS apps appearing from various partners at Google+ sandbox, there were a bunch of great questions coming our way at the developers sandbox, and on top of that my friends +Silvano Luciani and +Xiangtian Dai presented on integrating Sign-In, which you can watch on YouTube (or here!): One bit of news that might easily have been missed was that there was a new version of the iOS SDK released, version 1.3.0. This was a pretty small release for features, but incorporates a lot of feedback from developers, and addresses a couple of common issues.First, and possibly most helpfully, the various components have been packaged up as frameworks. There are now three packages in the SDK: GoogleOpenSource.framework - the open Google Toolbox libraries, and the Google+ servicesGooglePlus.framework - the headers and library file for the Google+ iOS SDKGo…

It has been a long time since I touched any IOS code, so I was quite looking forward to a chance to do some when the IOS team within Google+ released the SDK into preview at Google I/O last month. Luckily, the documentation on the SDK page on developers.google.com is excellent, and covers the basics of the setup, but in part because I've forgotten almost everything about XCode and IOS, I thought it best to just write down what I did and what I encountered, primarily as an Aide-mémoire for the future. Anyone building a new app should follow the documentation - but perhaps some developers will hit an issue I did and get something out of this post!

First things first, I had to set up a new OAuth2 client id at the API developer console with permissions for the Google+ API (I also added the Google+ History API, though this app does not use it so far). Next I created an OAuth2 client id for an installed application. It's important to make sure that the bundle ID specified here match…