Deeplinking Into The Google+ Apps

While setting up your application to receive deep links from the Google+ apps on web, Android and iOS is pretty well documented, 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.

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 ideal result.

We can fix this by adding the package name to the intent, which will open Google+ directly:

However, if we do that and the user doesn't have the Google+ app installed, they're going to have a bad time. We can check in two ways: either by using the PackageManager, or (if we're integrating the Google+ SDK) using the GooglePlusUtil that comes as part of the SDK:

For iOS, we can use the UIApplication class to test whether the Google+ app is available, using canOpenURL:, and then make a call to openURL: with the gplus:// based URL to start the app:

One small caveat is that only numeric profile IDs work on the gplus:// URLs, so make sure not to use a +VanityUrl if linking to a profile!

Popular posts from this blog

Common problems with Google+ Sign-In on Android

Image
It has been fantastic to see so many people trying out Google+ Sign-In, and through the bootcamps and other events I've had a chance to talk to some people who are actually implementing it in their apps. The Android integration is pretty straightforward, thanks to Google Play Services, but there are still some issues I've seem come up a couple of times.

tl;dr: make sure your app is set up in the API console, and make sure you can handle multiple onStart events coming in during sign-in.

1. Consent screen appears more than once. 

The basic life cycle of the PlusClient looks a bit like this:


When we call the onStart, we immediately call mPlusClient.connect(). Google Play Services checks whether the user is already signed in to the application, and, if so the onConnected method is instantly called and the user seamlessly signed in.

If the connect() call fails, then onConnectionFailed() is called with a ConnectionResult object, which represents the error. The error is probably RESOLU…
Keep reading

Client-Server Authentication with ID tokens

Image
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…
Keep reading

Upgrading Firebase.com & Using Google Sign In on Android

Image
Very quick post on a problem I've seen a few people hit where they are upgrading a Firebase.com project which uses Google Sign In on Android.
Just Tell Me What To Do Already 1. Upgrade your Firebase.com project

2. Connect your Android app, but do not enter a SHA1

3. Go to the old Google Developers/Google Cloud project you were using and copy each client ID used for an Android app (e.g. the debug and release versions at least). 

4. In the Auth > Sign In Method > Google panel, enter the client IDs you copied before. 

This ensures your existing app keeps working, and sets you up for transitioning to the new SDK.  Why Am I Doing This? There are a couple of things to know:  The specific combination of Android package name and SHA1 is unique across Google. It can only exist in a single Google project, and is associated with a single client ID. An upgraded Firebase project is a Google project underneath.  This means if you go through the upgrade flow, attempt to connect your Android…
Keep reading