Stop Google Cloud Messaging from forcing user to login

[James Mortensen]

As we all know, packaged apps are designed to run as completely separate apps, to give the user a completely independent experience from the Google Chrome browser.  With inline installations, we direct users to our website and then prompt them to install our packaged app.

This doesn't require them to login to the browser and gives them a completely seamless experience on our website.

However, we recently added Google Cloud Messaging so that we can push data from our server to a specific user.  However, in order for Google Cloud Messaging to work, the user is redirected to a Chrome tab prompting him or her to login to the Chrome browser.

This interrupts the flow by allowing Chrome to take over.

Currently, the user must login to Google in order to obtain the userID, which looks something like 123453212345435676, with the final channelId consisting of the appId and the userID:

    "123453212345435676/gbgnjgcjjembakhlnclnagjmojcdmofe"  

Ideally, we'd be able to use a userID to build the channelId, so that users that don't have Google Accounts aren't forced to create them.  This would allow us to use the push service without interrupting the user's experience.

I've attached a screenshot that shows our app loaded in a frameless window, but then because we're using "pushMessaging", the browser launches itself and asks the user to login.  This is confusing to users who think of our app as something different than Chrome.

James

[Dmitry Titov]

Hi James,

Indeed, GCM for Chrome v1 uses the connection to Google that is authenticated with a Google account. For apps that don't have a notion of user account or choose to use Google's accounts it is usually a convenient way as well.

An app that has its own userID space (if I understand you correctly) may eventually need users to sign into Google to use various Google services as well. It can indeed be a bit inconvenient for the users to be aware about multiple accounts. There is also an issue of using a Google account for routing while the user may switch app's accounts separately.

Having said this, I wonder how bad it is. Chrome is trying to get users sign in for a variety of other reasons - sync and notifications, cloud print and remoting are some features that rely on it. It is only enough to sync once, it stays signed in across restarts etc. Once signed in, users should  be able to use app w/o Chrome opening again... Or do you see something different then that?

Thanks,

Dmitry

James

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[James Mortensen]

Hi Dmitry,

Thanks for following up.  We're building a WebRTC SIP communications softphone, and we plan to authenticate our users using our own login service or whatever login service they prefer, whether that be Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  We're certainly not against users logging in with Google and are actively working on offering this as a login endpoint; however, we prefer offering our users options, especially when not all of our users are active Chrome users.

We love Google Chrome. Many of us in our organization use it as our primary browser, but we realize that there is a significant number of users who prefer Firefox or (shudders) Internet Explorer. As a result, we're trying not to advertise the fact that one must login to Google, especially when the user won't be using any Google services or API's.

In our case, we're building our app on Google's packaged apps platform to leverage WebRTC and our existing web development experience.  We're not using any Google services in our app at this time, so forcing our users to login to Google may affect our conversion rates.

We'd love to be able to use the Google Cloud Messaging service to help keep our communication softphone awake so our users will have an amazing experience receiving their calls, but we don't want to pop a Chrome browser window prompting them to login when they're not expecting it.  We'd love it if there was a way to identify a specific user logged into a packaged app without forcing us to use Google's login system (although we do plan to use it for users who love Google).

Hope this helps clarify our use case. :)

James

--
James Mortensen
Project Manager, AnswerConnect, Inc.
866-707-4590
james.m...@a-cti.com

[Dmitry Titov]

Thanks James.

We hear you. Thanks a lot for explanation of the use case, it helps. I hope the requirement to sign into Chrome won't throw a wrench into your plans, especially considering that it should be very infrequent, does not expose user's Google account and you may find it useful in other ways - for example, it allows using synchronized storage and File System, which provide a nice way to share state/settings of the app across all devices running Chrome. It also automatically installs the app itself on other machines with signed-in Chrome. This just start working automatically when users sign into Chrome once. So even if people don't use Chrome for browsing, they could indirectly benefit from growing set of Google services provided by Chrome...

[James Mortensen]

Hi Dmitry,

That works great for our users that use Chrome as their primary browser, but for the die-hards of those other browsers, we'd prefer not to draw attention to the fact that we're building on top of Chrome.  It just creates a lot of unnecessary questions.

James

[James Mortensen]

Also, not every person on the planet has a Google Account. This is a potential barrier to entry for our app and definitely something that complicates the user experience for something that those users will never use.  

Hope this helps!

James

[James Mortensen]

Hi Dmitry, 

A new challenge that has popped up because of this is that our app is now replicated across all of the user's Chrome profiles and machines, meaning that multiple copies of the app now run on the same machine, causing conflicts.

It would be much simpler to decouple the sync and all of the other "cool" stuff from the Google Cloud Messaging.  Again, we'd love to be able to use your stuff, but we may have to find another solution if this isn't the case.  

Hope this helps further clarify the use case.

James

On Tuesday, June 4, 2013 7:16:05 PM UTC-7, Dmitry Titov wrote:

[James Mortensen]

I was wondering if there was any update on making Google Cloud Messaging work without requiring users to have Google Accounts, making this a more seamless "App" experience?

Thanks!

James