Can I Develop An App Without API’s?

Android@lemmy.world – 13 points – 8 months ago

First off, im not new to Lemmy, im behind my Alt account. But I was to make this post because if an android app me and my boyfriend are currently working on, or soon to be working on. We value are privacy and security very much, and we take this much to ensure we are protected as much as we can. We know we can’t do 100%, but we can achieve 99.97%.

Anyways…

So, my boyfriend is in the process of making an Android app that lets users sign into their online accounts in one app. He said he wants to make this Twitter UI like app, with the ability to login with his accounts, with privacy and maintaining a healthy security. However, he has a problem due to us being in a situation where we ~~can’t~~ don’t want to pay for API’s for such services we have accounts for.

The main point, is it possible to make it to where; once the user opens the app, taps the button to sign in with Facebook let’s say, it opens Facebook in webview and when the user is done authenticating, the app then closes webview and shows content, within the custom UI in the app.

Same goes with other platforms like, Twitter, YouTube and what not.

Again, I’m not even sure if this is possible, but consuming that I have an android phone, and I play Fortnite at time to time, whenever I go to sign into my epic games account. The game opens webview and when I’m done signing in, it closes and continues with my account shown.

It’s basically a privacy security focused browser, but with an added features like viewing and managing your online accounts.

If I'm getting this right, you're planning on displaying some websites in a WebView in which you inject JS to modify the UI / add features?

Well, you totally can, I often do that on the desktop using Greasemonkey. Just be prepared for lost time whenever one of the websites introduce a breaking change.

We do this at work and we have basically a full time dev working on maintaining the code for just a few websites.

Thanks, I’ll check out grease monkey.

You are trying to run unauthorized bots on Facebook etc. Of course anything you do that annoys Facebook makes me happy, but they are constantly trying to block such bots, and it's a cat and mouse game. Keeping it reliable enough to support as a product may be a headache. Anyway it's called web scraping and there's a bunch of lore and products for it, like proxy access to rooms full of phones. The general flavor is something like SEO. A seedy atmosphere with lots of hucksters claiming to have their own secret tricks, but I think there aren't real mysteries..

If you don't want to use API, which API are designed specifically for this kind of thing, then you may have to use web scraping to do what you want.

I don’t like the idea of web scraping as it doesn’t seem moral in my eyes, or my BF’s. I was hoping it was possible to just embed said platform (Facebook, for example) in the app.

I mean if you are building an app that embeds the web front-ends for a bunch of social media sites, then you are building... A browser. With a bunch of bookmarks.

I plan on implementing such feature (like Facebook, Instagram) where it saves the login. But yeah, a private browser designed mainly for browsing social media…

So a browser with a password manager?

And completely loses the privacy goal.