I am in the process of building an Android application and I would like to request some assistance regarding the Google Drive API. Specifically, I aim to retrieve particular files from a designated Google Drive account (for instance, [email protected]) whenever a certain action occurs in my app, as this account holds files relevant to my application.
Is this even possible with the Google Drive API v2? I’ve been looking through the available resources but haven’t found any straightforward instructions on how to access files from a specific account, rather than the user’s personal account.
If any experienced developers have tackled this before, I would be grateful if you could share code snippets or direct me to helpful tutorials. I’m especially keen to learn about the authentication process and how to properly fetch the files in this context.
What you’re asking about requires service account authentication rather than regular OAuth2 flow. I’ve implemented something similar where we needed to access a shared company Drive account. You’ll need to create a service account in Google Cloud Console, generate JSON credentials, and then have the target Google Drive account share the necessary files/folders with the service account’s email address. The service account can then authenticate without user interaction and access those shared resources. Keep in mind that with API v2 being deprecated, you might want to consider migrating to Drive API v3 for better long-term support. The authentication flow is quite different from typical user-based OAuth, so make sure you’re following the service account documentation specifically.
for sure! u gotta use oauth2 to get access. the account ([email protected]) needs to allow permissions to your app first. after that, go ahead and use the drive service to fetch files from that account, not just the user’s personal stuff.
I ran into this exact scenario last year when building a corporate app that needed to pull templates from our organization’s shared Drive. The key insight is that you need the target account owner to explicitly grant access to your application’s credentials. There are two main approaches depending on your use case. If the files are meant to be publicly accessible within your organization, have the owner share the specific folders with your app’s client ID and use standard OAuth2 with appropriate scopes. However, if you need programmatic access without user intervention each time, the service account route mentioned earlier is your best bet. One gotcha I encountered was that Drive API v2 has some limitations with service account file enumeration, so you might need to work with specific file IDs rather than browsing entire directories. Also worth noting that the owner account will need to have sharing permissions enabled for external applications.