My android phone isn’t logged in to google, but I do have an account. When I log in to Pebble on the website, that’s what I use.
However, when I try to log the phone app in, it gets into a loop where it asks Android to provide the account; and that would result in me enabling a google account for the whole phone, which I don’t want to do.
If I selected Apple or GitHub login, I get a web browser popup. If I could have the same facility for the Google account (i.e. the way I presume this would work on an Apple phone) that would be very useful.
I know I’m an outlier in having a non-logged-in-Android, but this is a privacy choice in the same vein as Pebble’s own local speech-to-text models, so I know you understand my motivation
So, is there any way I can get the app to log me in to pebble via google, without using the phone’s google account services?
Can you share a screenshot of the Apple or GitHub login problems? Is that not working for you?
Unfortunately, the built in system is the only way we support for a Google login. We don’t support it through the web view. You should be able to sign in to the Google system on your phone. Sign in to Pebble and then sign out from Google on your phone immediately.
I guess I was hoping that you had code from the iOS use-case, which I was hoping was web-based. The Apple and GitHub options both go via the web browser to their respective sites, which I guess work well, but I don’t want to log in with any account from them either. Although of the three, Apple are probably the least-bad option from a privacy perspective.
So there isn’t any “fault” to show you, just a more general objection to the assumption that the only way to get auth from Google is to have the phone itself logged in; I don’t think “logging in to google and then logging out” would protect my privacy much at all (it would just allow google to positively associate me with this device), even though as a technical step once I’d auth’d to Pebble the app would work … until I guess my session expires one day?
I’d much rather you didn’t restrict app features so that only people using the big tech monopolies can get to them; but on the other hand I understand you’re not pitching Pebble as a “privacy is the most important thing” company, and the motivation is strong to make sure that you don’t have to manage users own credential stores yourself (well, except that you do that here for the forums). However, I would suggest that you could do this safely these days if you associated a user only with a webauthn/passkey, perhaps with a hash of their email address for the username; because that way you don’t have to be responsible for storing any particular secrets that could be abused if lost.
