Consume Google API from UWP

I’m writing this post so that you don’t have to spend too much time as I did to figure how to authenticate and invoke Google APIs from a UWP application.
I found several solutions, mostly outdated, and tons of quite articulated documentation, including the official one from Google, all discussing about the same few APIs, but i got no chance to have it working, until I got to this solution.

So, Lets’s go!

As initial step we need to register our app into Google developer portal, registration will return us a couple of fundamentals info: Client Key and Client Secret.
Navigate to console.developer.google.com , login and select Credentials under APIs and Services on the left side of the portal.

click on Create credentials and select the oAuthClientID, you will be promped with a similar screen

Required information are, Application Type, Name and Redirect (you can use whatever Uri you want here), when done click Create, this will generate the mandatory Client ID and Client secret info.

Download the code from https://github.com/corradocavalli/GoogleLogin2/ the sample shows you how to reried logged user informations like name, email, picture…

If you analyze the code you’ll note that we use Xamarin Auth library for all oAuth2 stuff…

and basically the procedure is divided onto three main steps:

1) Get the Google auth token

2) Get oAuth2 token

3) Call Google API passing the oAuth2 token, in our case we retrieve user info, but you can use any API you prefer

There’s not too much to add but the fact that I’ve lost many hours trying to figure out how to make this basic sample working and I agree that using a library, maybe the official one from Google, would be better, but despite several attempts I was not able to make it working on UWP since looks like that some core parts related to authorization are not there yet.

Hope this saved you some headaches