This can be simple or complex, depending on how you look at it. I'm sure this will be an issue for _many_ applications going forward but I'll start with mine because I haven't seen a good answer to this yet.
I'm in development of a multiplayer component to a game and the way it needs to work is that a user can create a new game and add their friends to it. The problem is that the only client is in android so really the only people that could play it would have to be running android. What would be the ideal solution is if somehow the user's contacts had a flag that indicated if the contact has registered an android phone to a given email address. Does that exist? I'm assuming that nothing like that exists so my solution is to have each user register for the online service by providing all of their contact email addresses. This way, when another user tries to add the to a game, they can be found by any of their emails. It's really not my favorite way of doing this and I think it's not the best experience for the user but it's the only way I know to guarantee that when users add their friend to a game by any of the friend's email addresses, it will work. I'm sure people will ask - Why not just use their gmail address? The answer is because there are many people like me who use gmail but do not have that listed as their primary email and so my friends with android handsets will probably be trying to add me by my non-gmail email address. I would have to register both so that people can add me by wither. My other issue is authentication. I'm going to ask the user to provide a password so that others can not connect as them to the game service. What would be really nice is if I could somehow just authenticate them against google to know that they really are who they say they are. I know there is a google auth service of some sort but is there any way to pass-through the credentials from android to it? Basically I don't think it's good to have users enter their google account and password info. This is where a token-based thing would be very nice. My multiplayer game server is a server I am hosting myself. It's Ruby on Rails with RJB (Ruby Java Bridge) to run Java libraries. Solutions? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
