I’m working on an Android app and need some help with Google Drive integration. When users perform a specific action in my app, I want to fetch certain files from a particular Google Drive account (like [email protected]) that contains data related to my application.
I’ve been looking through the Google Drive API v2 documentation but I’m not sure if this is even possible. Can I programmatically access files from a predetermined Drive account rather than asking users to authenticate with their own accounts?
If this can be done, could someone share a code example or guide me to the right resources? I’m particularly interested in understanding the authentication flow for this scenario.
Been there, dealt with the same confusion. You can’t bypass Google’s auth system - the account owner has to grant access to your app. But there’s a solid workaround with service accounts that saved my project. Set up a service account in Google Cloud Console, then have the Drive owner share the folders/files with your service account’s email. Your app gets permanent access without constantly asking users to authenticate. You can bundle the service account credentials with your app, just watch out for security issues. Works great when you control both the app and the Drive account.
Accessing files from a specific Google Drive account without user authentication is not feasible. The specified account ([email protected]) must grant permissions to your application through OAuth2. A possible solution is to have the account authenticate once during the initial setup and securely store the refresh token for future API requests. If you are dealing with a Google Workspace account, utilizing a service account with domain-wide delegation is an option, although it requires admin configuration. For standard Gmail accounts, the owner needs to authorize your application through OAuth at least once.
yeah, this is tricky. you can’t access someone’s drive without permisson. you’ll need a service account with proper scopes set up. the drive owner has to share their files/folders with your service account email first. check google’s service account docs for android - it’s different from the regular oauth flow.