Social Login: Driving up Registrations!
Imagine installing a mobile application and the first thing you have to do is to fill out a five-column form just to register yourself on the app. You would just close the app in frustration rather than fill out this much information for just a sign-up. Nowadays, every other mobile application has a login/signup option for creating a specific user identity for any user. The standard way, which is not only dated but extremely tedious, is to ask every detail from the user like, his name, e-mail, phone number, bio, etc. But, as stated above, this would only leave your users annoyed even before they land onto your app. People want things to be quick and convenient. Statistics show that people interact much more with apps that have social logins embedded in them.
Let’s assume you install two mobile applications from the app store (iOS), or the play store (android):
- One app has a login page asking you to fill in your name, age, gender, bio, e-mail, phone number, date of birth, password, confirm password, username, occupation, and more. And, only after all this can you login!
- Another app that has a login page having two buttons: Google Login/ Facebook login and bam! LOGIN COMPLETE!
I bet all of you reading this didn’t even read all the entries in the 1st option, hence filling all that information for a sign-up is a distant thought. That’s how important social logins are for mobile applications.
With the importance established, I would now go on explaining in short, the steps involved if you want to integrate social logins (Google, Facebook) in a mobile application.
- The first thing, which is the primary step, is to register your application on the developer’s console, of the Facebook/Google platform. You can find them here:
Facebook- https://developers.facebook.com/
Google- console.developers.google.com - Now, you have to find out the app ID for your application, by selecting a product ‘android’ for android platform, and ‘iOS’ for iPhone. The developer’s console will guide you through certain steps like: Including the App ID in your app code, Registering hash keys for your machine, on which you are building the application, Including dependencies and SDKs for Google/Facebook login, Add buttons to your layout, and etc.
- Once you have successfully installed the login plugins in your application, it’s time for you to connect it to your login (app’s main login). Facebook login throws details about the token received by the login on Facebook. With this token, you can fetch user details from the APIs provided by Facebook and Google.
- There you have it, user details like name, e-mail, or any other details, depending upon the scope of the profile access you set on the SDK settings in the main application code.
- Now you have to fetch details and set it to your mobile database. And, that’s it, you have your Facebook or Google login in your application, making for a better UI, and much better user experience on the logins.
P.S. Unlike Facebook, Google offers you a client-id, which also has to be included while integrating a google login in your mobile application (Google console will tell you this at the installation time).
This is the process of including social logins in your mobile application. Pretty easy huh? Just make sure all the entries are filled correctly word by word. Social login integration would take a maximum of 20 minutes if you know how to do it. However, beware, it can also take much more time, if you fill even a single entry wrong.
The thing is that a single entry in the developer’s console is so important that it can cause the integration to not work. And being a single entry inside the settings, it’s very hard to identify which entry is causing the failure.
A Pro Tip: Know your service callback URLs, your data callbacks, and your cancel callbacks, for successful integration of social logins in your mobile application.
I hope this post helped you understand the key behind making user access easier, convenient, and seamless. Thank you.
