Yahoo! OpenID and OAuth: iPhone Optimized! (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)

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YDN YDN Blog Yahoo! OpenID and OAuth: iPhone Optimized!

Yahoo! Developer Network Blog

October 23, 2009

Yahoo! OpenID and OAuth: iPhone Optimized!

Yahoo! engineers love hacking their iPhones, and that's why we're happy to announce that the Yahoo! OpenID and OAuth services are now iPhone optimized! Yahoo! users no longer need to pinch and spread when signing into websites with their Yahoo! OpenID, or when authorizing data sharing using OAuth.

OpenID streamlines the sign in and registration process, making it easy for users to reuse an account and profile that they already have. Given that there are over 330 million active Yahoo! users with OpenID enabled accounts, chances are that a large percentage of unrecognized website visitors are only a couple clicks away from signing in with their Yahoo ID and Profile, allowing for a more personalized and relevant experience.

While the traditional registration and profile manual setup can discourage desktop users from registering at the sites they visit, asking a mobile user to fill out a registration form and profile is really unreasonable. By accepting OpenID, mobile websites can let their users easily sign with their Yahoo ID and Profile, and because OpenID is an open and interoperable standard, the same interface can be reused to accept identities from other OpenID Providers too, including Google, MySpace, and AOL.

Native iPhone applications that use Yahoo's OAuth protected APIs including Contacts and Updates now have an OAuth approval UI that's been optimized for the iPhone. Websites that have their own login and registration system can use standalone OAuth to access data and services on behalf of the user, while sites that let users sign in with OpenID can use the Hybrid OpenID OAuth interface. Both the standalone OAuth and Hybrid OpenID OAuth user interfaces are now iPhone optimized.

Happy Hacking,

Allen Tom (@atom)
Architect, Yahoo Membership

P.S. If you'd like to learn more about OpenID, OAuth, and identity, then the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, CA on Nov 2-4 is the place to be. The Yahoo! Developer Network is a proud sponsor of the IIW, which is where OpenID and OAuth got their start.

Posted at October 23, 2009 12:38 PM | Permalink

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Comments

Nice one, are you using media queries to optimise the UI? In theory if you are then this will work on Android & Opera Mobile too?

Posted by: Ryan at October 23, 2009 3:09 PM

@Ryan - The UI is only optimized for iPhones. It should be really easy to apply the same optimizations to other webkit/safari mobile browsers. We'd be very happy to take a look at optimizing the UI for other mobile devices, if we could get some devices to test on. Please send us your unlocked (and prepaid) Palm Pres, Blackberries, and Android phones to us, and we'll do our best. :)

Posted by: Allen Tom at October 24, 2009 11:14 AM

This will be pretty handy for all iphone users to operate their yahoo openid and OAuth.

Posted by: spiele at October 26, 2009 12:58 AM

Nice post! I really like it very much.Hope it would help the iphone users.Thanks for the pretty cool post.Keep it up.Keep blogging.

Posted by: school internet filters47 at October 26, 2009 6:03 AM

We've recently done something similar over at OpenStreetMap - but we used media CSS queries so that it works on many browsers. Check out what it looks like with Firefox 3.5 if you don't own a mobile phone! Targetting specific browsers or platforms is pretty old-skool.

Also, I find typing my name, email and URL in here to comment on this post somewhat .... ironic.

Posted by: Andy Allan at October 27, 2009 10:20 AM

@Andy Allan - Very impressive job you guys did with Open Street Map. We'd love to enable OpenID and OAuth for other mobile devices, but we just don't have any other devices to test on. We did it for the iPhone since virtually all the Yahoo engineers working on OpenID and OAuth own an iPhone (as their own personal property) and we thought it would be great to make the stuff we work on work nicely with the phone that we own.

btw - OSM is exactly the kind of site that we'd love to see accept OpenID!

Posted by: Allen Tom at October 28, 2009 3:28 PM

So why not use this for all mobile users? Why iphone only? The default page is unusable from non-iphone mobiles.

Posted by: Håkan Jonsson at November 20, 2009 7:41 AM

I don't suppose you could use one of the user agent switchers to test how things render for at least the webkit based mobile phones?

Adding support for the Pre for instance should be fairly easy and could be as easy as just detecting the correct user-agent string.

Else you could always download and install the various emulators.

Posted by: jh at December 9, 2009 12:23 PM