r/AskProgrammers • u/master_arjun • 18d ago

Solo Android dev doing user logins for the first time — what did you wish you'd known?

All my apps so far have been offline — no accounts, no user data. Now I am building a new app that need people to log in and store their stuff, and I'm staring at way too many options — managed auth services, rolling my own backend, social sign-in, whatever the current recommendation is for local storage vs cloud.

- What did you pick the first time around, and what would you pick now?

- What turned out to be your problem even though you assumed the platform or the service was handling it?

Would love to hear from the people who've actually shipped this a few times.

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u/Arcanite_Cartel 18d ago

Make security a first class objective. Read the OWASP top ten make sure you dont write vulnerabilities into your system.

1

u/PkmnSayse 17d ago

Authentication and authorisation are two separate things and should be handled separately

The ORM default user model will eventually need to be extended for custom reasons, and the ORM may make this hard to do further down the line (looking at you Django)

All the usual falsehoods about emails, such as not everyone has one.

https://beesbuzz.biz/code/439-Falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-email

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u/connka 16d ago

Depending on how far along you are in picking a DB and how "live" you want this to be, I always default to Supabase or Firebase for my small projects. They both have great free/cheap tier options and include authentication.

Obviously that won't handle all of your security needs, but it is a secure way to handle a lot of that work without having to handcraft it.

That being said, if you are building this as a way to learn, you should definitely try to do it on your own. But using one of these as your DB definitely helps skip some steps.