SimpleAuth

SimpleAuth is designed to do the hard work of social account login on iOS. It is designed with a small set of public APIs backed by a set of "providers" the implement the functionality needed to communicate with a given service.

I plan to ship the following providers at launch:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram

I also have plans to provide:

• Twitter web
• Twitter xauth
• Facebook web
• Tumblr

The API for creating providers is likewise simple but it is not concrete yet. Every provider will be in its own git repository and CocoaPod so that you can install just the components you need.

Providers will be able to set fallbacks such that attempting to login with Facebook will fallback to Facebook web if no system account is present.

Usage

Configuring and using SimpleAuth is easy:

// Somewhere in your app boot process
[SimpleAuth configuration][@"twitter"] = @{
    @"consumer_key" : @"KEY",
    @"consumer_secret" : @"SECRET"
};

// Run the login process
[SimpleAuth authorize:@"twitter" completion:^(id responseObject, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, NSError *error) {
    NSLog(@"%@", responseObject);
}];

Implementing a Provider

Building your own provider is fairly straightforward. There are a handful of methods you'll need to implement:

Register your provider with SimpleAuth:

+ (void)load {
    @autoreleasepool {
        [SimpleAuth registerProviderClass:self];
    }
}

Let SimpleAuth know what type of provider you are registering:

+ (NSString *)type {
    return @"facebook";
}

Optionally, you may return a set of default options for all authorization options to use:

+ (NSDictionary *)defaultOptions {
    return @{
        @"permissions" : @[ @"email" ]
    };
}

Finally, provide a method for handling authorization:

- (void)authorizeWithCompletion:(SimpleAuthRequestHandler)completion {
	// Use values in self.options to customize behavior
	// Perform authentication
	// Call the completion
}

Challenges

The biggest challenge I face at this point is enabling customization of the authentication process. Almost all of the above providers require presenting UI to the user. Twitter requires an action sheet for selecting an account from all present system accounts and Instagram requires a web view controller. I need a generic mechanism that can allow the caller to change the behavior of presented UI.

License

SimpleAuth is released under the MIT license.

Thanks

Special thanks to my friend @soffes for advising on the SimpleAuth API design.