Authentication to dropbox on tvOS

Thanks for posting about this. Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say "the UI does not meet the tvOS requirements"? Can you link to any relevant documentation? Once we have a better understanding of the capabilities available, we'll be happy to investigate to see if/what solution we might be able to offer.

Guy G.7

I'll try to explain the scenario.

I'm using the dropbox iOS sdk. When I'm trying to setup a dropbox connection, Dropbox SDK opens a UI element require the user for username and password. On iPhone it is working well, the user fill in the information and it establish the connection.

In tvOS, the form with the username and password is presented on the screen (see attached)

But since it is tvOK, there is no way for the user to type the username or password. It should be a tvOS spacial screen - see also attached below a tvOS input screen

So I assume there are two options to solve it.

1. Dropbox develop a tvOS login screen

2. Find a way to send the username and password programmatically so I will be able to develop the UI myself.

Thanks! > <img id=

Phil K.7

I'm curious about this too.

To sharpen the question a bit: it's not possible to use webviews on tvOS, so the OAuth flow shown above won't work. Does Dropbox have any plans to ship a tvOS optimized login method?

Thanks for all of the information and screenshots guys, that's very helpful. I'll bring this up with the team internally.

One thing that may work with the existing infrastructure though would be how Apple TV apps of the current generation work for connecting external accounts. That is, the Apple TV app gives the user a short URL for the app's web site to browse to on an Internet connected device with a browser, and that web site processes a standard OAuth 2 app authorization flow. Upon redirected back to the app's web site, it can send down the necessary token to the TV app. That would offer a better user experience, especially if the user is already signed in to Dropbox on their phone, for example, as they'd only have to type in the short URL on their device, as opposed to typing in their full Dropbox credentials on the Apple TV (possibly including a second factor, etc.).

Lars M.4

Has anyone got this working yet, or are the dropbox team still working on a proper solution?

I don't have any updates on this, either internally or externally. We'd love to hear if anyone has experimented with the flow I mentioned in my last reply though, as we imagine that'd be a much better experience for the user than trying to enter all of their credentials on the TV.

Lars M.4

Not sure if I follow your suggestion you gave earlier - not used dropbox that much earlier (from a developer perspective).

Entering credentials on the AppleTV will not be any problem, since it supports using the iPhone or iPad as an input device, AFAIK.

Since the tvOS doesn't support any local storage larger than ~0.5MB/app, we have to use cloud services for storing/retrieving data that we don't want/can deliver with the app download. So in my opinion, it is very important that you support tvOS :-)

Thanks for the information! Do you have any documentation for the input method using an iOS device you can link to?

Lars M.4

Regarding ATV4, consider it a qualified guess - even if I know I can't tell you :-)

For ATV3, the iPhone/iPad can act as a keyboard to it, so it should be the same for ATV4!? Dictating with Siri will only be supported in eight languages in the beginning, so for everyone else it's the iPhone/iPad-keyboard they have to use...

I would like to second(or third) the request for tvOS support.

With the new Apple TV, cloud solutions will be very important and I know a lot of my users do not want to or can rely on iCloud.

Thanks for the feedback! At this point, we're recommending developers use the flow I described earlier, especially since this is already possible with the existing API.

It's also the same as how connecting providers is already done on the existing Apple TV product:

>

Is there documentation for this available? I cannot seem to find it.

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs#oa2-authorize

On the Dropbox side, there's no special documentation since this would just utilize the normal OAuth flow, documented here:

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/oauthguide

I don't know if Apple offers any guidance or documentation on the Apple TV side of things of course though.

So, that seems to work for now. However, I do get this warning from the linker:

ld: warning: URGENT: building for tvOS simulator, but linking in object file (.../DropboxSDK.framework/DropboxSDK) built for (unknown). Note: This will be an error in the future.

Any chance you can build a framework for tvOS?

Steve M.

The code for the iOS SDK is part of the downloadable zip file. I assume you can just add the code directly and compile however you're compiling the rest of your app. Is that not true?

Doh, I was not aware that the Dropbox SDK source was available (didn't even check).

Now, it seems that when I download a file via dropbox on tvOS, it tries to save it in a Dropbox temp folder. Just as a heads-up, I haven't dug into the source yet but it seems that Dropbox temp folder is in the documents folder. tvOS has no documents folder and the download to the Dropbox temp folder fails.

So with the source available, I can probably fix that easily but you might want to look into it for other devs...

Steve M.

I'm not sure what you mean... could you share the code you're using to download the file? I believe you can choose whatever local path you want?

Oh, I use this:

[self.restClient loadFile:path intoPath:local];

With the local path being in the cache folder and available.

But the error happens when DBRestClient (or what class is behind there) finished the download and tries to move it to the 'local' path ("data" in this example):

[ERROR] DBRequest#connectionDidFinishLoading: error moving temp file to desired location: “6B515164-57F8-4152-992E-486CA8FB0EFE-5029-000054C21A6EFDD9” couldn’t be moved to “data” because either the former doesn't exist, or the folder containing the latter doesn't exist.

Never mind, my mistake.

Dropbox uses the tmp directory, NSTemporaryDirectory()

I didn't. Thanks again. Works fine.

Hi everyone,

I'm also looking for a way to connect my tvOS app to Dropbox.

DropboxSDK.framework uses WebKit which is not available on tvOS.

On which way should I go ?

Thanks in advance.

This was discussed earlier in this thread. Please read through it for our recommendation.

It's not relevant enough imho

Can you please help more ?

https://opensource.dropbox.com/#api-sdks

What do you need help with specifically? What issues are you seeing?

Ameesh K.

John - the suggestion was to get the iOS SDK source, add it to your project manually, and compile that way, as opposed to using a pre-built library/framework.

https://github.com/dropbox/SwiftyDropbox/blob/master/Source/Auth.swift

Auth.swift in SwiftyDropbox is using WebKit:

But there is no WebKit in tvOS...

How can I authenticate to Dropbox on tvOS ?

Cheers,

Ameesh K.

Look into Digits for tvOS:

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/12/02/twitter-announces-digits-for-tv-os/

g r.1

Here's a pretty crude rails implementation of what Gregory above suggested https://github.com/bluwave/tvOSDropboxAccessToken .

Then once your tv app has the access token and userID, you can call:

Dropbox.handleRedirectURL(NSURL(string:"db-\(appKey)://2/token#access_token=\(accessToken)&uid=\(userID)&token_type=bearer")!)

This feels pretty hacky though. Need a better way to save that info into Dropbox client.

https://dropbox.github.io/SwiftyDropbox/api-docs/latest/Classes/DropboxAuthManager.html#/s:FC13SwiftyDropbox18DropboxAuthManager16storeAccessTokenFS0_FCS_18DropboxAccessTokenSb

Thanks for putting this together and sharing it!

A more direct way to save an access token is to use DropboxAuthManager.storeAccessToken:

Hi everyone,

I still can't log in to Dropbox on my tvOS app...

Any help from Dropbox would be much appreciated.

Thanks