So what does BlackBerry 10.2 have to offer? One of the new platform features added to the BlackBerry 10.2 SDK beta is the Identity Service Library (IDS), which over time, will support multiple identity providers, the first of which are BlackBerry ID and BlackBerry Profile. One of the great things about this service is that it frees your users from having to remember yet another login profile, and saves you from having to build user authentication into your app.
Through this standardized BlackBerry Identity Service, developers will be able to register with a supported identity provider on BlackBerry 10 to:
- Provide user authentication directly from within your application;
- Allow users to access off-device content from within your app; and,
- Provide a personalized user experience by retrieving and integrating users’ personal information in your app (i.e. first name, last name, screen name).
BlackBerry 10 supported Identity Providers:
BlackBerry ID Identity Service allows users to access BlackBerry ID control resources (i.e. users’ personal information).
- BlackBerry® ID is an identity service which gives customers convenient access to multiple BlackBerry products, services and applications using one login
- Allows apps to perform authentication using the users BlackBerry ID instead of prompting the user for multiple credentials.
- BlackBerry Profile: Allows access to off-device secure encrypted storage
- Allows the same app, installed on multiple devices access to the same information
- Allows apps written by the same vendor to sync and share some vendor-specific data associated with the user.
- Storage is accessible remotely from all BlackBerry 10 devices logged in with the same BlackBerry ID
BlackBerry ID and BlackBerry Profile are currently the only supported identity providers. As an example, if you integrate your app with BlackBerry ID as your identity provider, your users could access BlackBerry ID-protected resources from within your app, without having to log in again. Simplicity is definitely important to deliver any good application user experience, and with BlackBerry ID identity provider, you can now automatically sign users in to your app after they sign in with their BlackBerry ID account on their devices.
In the current release of the IDS API, you will still be required to maintain some user information as IDS will provide you with a persistent identifier for the user. Additional features, such as third-party federation and authorization, will be added in future releases of the platform.
So why wait? Get started today! The knowledge base article below directs you to sample code that demonstrates how to integrate with BlackBerry 10.2 Identity Service. Also don’t forget that this is a platform feature which is supported through both BlackBerry Native/Cascades development and Cordova/HTML5 SDK.
Resources:
Knowledge Base Article: BlackBerry 10.2 Identity Service Library