ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Niklas Wenzel <nikwen.developer@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Today I had a long discussion with Jonas Drange on IRC about handling
authentication failures for online accounts better.

This has come to our awareness because we've recently had some
account-polld issues related to that. In all cases account authentication
stopped working for some reason and account-polld kept trying to
reauthenticate the accounts forever. One example for this was when the user
changed his password.
Given the nature of account-polld and that it even runs when the user does
not actively use his phone, it would be great to 1) stop checking for new
notifications and 2) inform the user about the failure.
This, of course, does not need to happen when the issues are temporary
(e.g. network failures) but just like the credentials can be invalid there
can be a lot of cases in which we are unable to recover without any
additional user input or in which we are unable to recover at all.

In these cases, we should probably notify the user, e.g. by displaying a
notification in the message tray, and should additionally revoke access to
the account for account-polld (or in this case the Gmail webapp), so that
it stops polling them and so that the user sees that there aren't going to
be any further notifications in the future.

Jonas mentioned that he once saw a notification like that on the desktop.
Maybe we can also use that code on the phone?

I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas on this topic.

Cheers,
Niklas