I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to properly set up the Google Drive API and Google Sheets API in my Android app. The official docs were confusing and I couldn’t find clear examples anywhere. After finally getting it working, I want to share what I learned so others don’t have to go through the same headache I did.
Yeah, the API docs are a total mess. I ran into this last year - the worst part is when Google’s libraries conflict with each other. You’ll get these bizarre runtime errors that make no sense if your Drive and Sheets client versions don’t play nice together. One heads up: auth flows work differently on real devices vs emulators, especially the account picker. I’d spin up a separate test project first so you don’t accidentally break your main app while figuring this out.
totally feel you on this! the oauth stuff is a pain. i played around with the scopes for a while too. what settings worked for you? just curious!
The gradle dependencies trip up most people at first. Use matching versions of google-api-services-drive and google-api-services-sheets - they share libraries that’ll conflict if mismatched. Don’t forget to enable both APIs in your Google Cloud Console project. I made that rookie mistake and wasted hours debugging “authentication errors” that were really just permission issues. Service accounts are way cleaner than OAuth for most cases, especially when you don’t need users accessing their personal files.