Fabian and me did a bit of digging on GNOME Online Accounts and they turned out to be rather disappointing. It uses OAuth - authentication method meant for web apps. So you can't just enter username and password in Switchboard once and for all - you must have internet connection, click a button that opens a specific web page, and enter your credentials there. And that doesn't store your username and password, so e.g. if you have a Google account authenticated in GOA, you'll have to re-enter your credentials in any app that requires username/password - and most apps do (Postler, Empathy, etc etc etc). Well, Google provides experimental OAuth-based email access, but they're the only ones to do that. Nobody uses OAuth for XMPP or other chat protocols yet.
Also, there's a huge legal mess with API keys stored in the open. What's worse, there are API usage limits for half of GOA services. Looks like GNOME managed to negotiate more or less unlimited usage for their API keys, but we're not as huge as GNOME... There are also some extensibility and modularity concerns about GOA brought up in GNOME mailing list, but I'm not in a position to discuss this aspect. -- shnatsel
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