Dropbox - Android - How to login to dropbox without the user knowing they are using Dropbox?

Question

I am trying to develop an application that uses some sort of cloud storage. I thought dropbox would be perfect to use. I already have my app key and app secret.

In the example that they give for the DBRoulette, you go through an external GUI to login to Dropbox. For my app, I just want to log in behind the scenes with not having the user know that the cloud portion is Dropbox

Any suggestions to make this happen would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This is simply not possible, at least not with the current public APIs that DropBox provides. I doubt that this will change any time soon, and that's a good thing.

Dropbox forces you to use Oauth for authentication and authorization and they have good reasons for that.

Most service providers that offer SDKs to allow third party apps to integrate with them use Oauth (Twitter,Dropbox,Linkedin,Google,SalesForce,.....).

An important part is that the user always needs to authorize the application to access the users data on their behalf.

This is always a manual step (in most cases only performed once) that the end-user needs to do. He always needs to click a button somewhere to explicitly give his/her permission.

It cannot be done silently in the background, just like you cannot silently send SMS text messages in Android without forcing the user to grant permission to do that.