Feature Request: Sharing authentication state between apps from the same developer

[wrbl606]

Description

Not a bug, rather guidance or a feature request.

On Android and iOS (though achieved in a very different manner), apps from the same developer can exchange information. Is amplify_auth_cognito ready for sharing user tokens in such a way, so authentication state is shared between a group of apps from the same developer? If so, what needs to be done to opt in to such behaviour, and if not will you consider implementing this feature or provide documentation on how to achieve that?

Categories

• Analytics
• API (REST)
• API (GraphQL)
• Auth
• Authenticator
• DataStore
• Notifications (Push)
• Storage

Steps to Reproduce

Not a bug, but also no way to report feature requests 😇

Screenshots

No response

Platforms

• iOS
• Android
• Web
• macOS
• Windows
• Linux

Flutter Version

3.19.5

Amplify Flutter Version

1.7.0

Deployment Method

Amplify CLI

Schema

No response

[Jordan-Nelson]

Hello @wrbl606 - Thanks for opening the request.

On iOS this is supported via accessGroup. This value will be used to set ksecattraccessgroup in iOS Keychain.

Here is an example of how to set that value.

final auth = AmplifyAuthCognito(
  secureStorageFactory: AmplifySecureStorage.factoryFrom(
    iOSOptions: IOSSecureStorageOptions(accessGroup: 'foo'),
  ),
);

There is no equivalent for Android currently. We can mark this as a feature request to start tracking interest.

[wrbl606]

Thank you! Assuming we'll implement the data sharing solution on our own for Android, is there a way to make the AmplifyAuthCognito use manually provided tokens to perform authentication tasks?

[Mik77o]

Thank you! Assuming we'll implement the data sharing solution on our own for Android, is there a way to make the AmplifyAuthCognito use manually provided tokens to perform authentication tasks?

Assuming that this is currently not possible, perhaps if it comes to a new feature it would be possible to use AccountManager for Android. 🤔

[Jordan-Nelson]

Apologies for the delayed response. You can create your own implementation of credential storage. Please see the docs here, which show a simple example of an in memory credential store.

[Mik77o]

@Jordan-Nelson Thanks for the reply!

So if we implement it ourselves for Android, sharing credentials between many apps will be possible, or do we also have to implement this mechanism ourselves? This may be a stupid question, but it's completely new to me.

This documentation mentions EncryptedSharedPreferences on Android.

[Jordan-Nelson]

If you use Amplify's implementation, Android EncryptedSharedPreferences is used.

If you build your own implementation, you need to decide where to store tokens and how to share them across applications and you need to implement that.

[Mik77o]

@Jordan-Nelson Thanks for your reply! I'd like to ask about a related topic. Is there any special effort required on the frontend side when we want to use the same user pool across multiple mobile applications? Regarding the concept itself, I found some valuable information here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/application-client-based-multi-tenancy.html.

[Jordan-Nelson]

There is nothing in Amplify Flutter preventing the same user pool from being used in multiple apps. As discussed, Amplify Flutter will not share credentials across applications automatically though.

[Mik77o]

There is nothing in Amplify Flutter preventing the same user pool from being used in multiple apps. As discussed, Amplify Flutter will not share credentials across applications automatically though.

Okay, thanks for confirming this fact!