Does fitbit offer a single sign on experience?

[drewauman]

We have an authentication provider within our app already.   I am curious if there is anyway to not have to have the user login again to fitbit, via some type of single sign on capability?

Thank you!

Drew

[JohnFitbit]

@drewauman Are you asking in terms of asking the user to provide consent to share data to your application each time you want to pull data? Or in general, for the user to store their account information in their browser to log into their Fitbit account?

[drewauman]

Hi John,

I am thinking of a scenario where our user is in our native IOS/Android mobile app, if the user wants to enter an item in their food log they could navigate to an icon that says "Fitbit Food Log" and when clicked it would take them through an oAuth flow to authenticate but then we could drop them into a web view within out app that shows the Fitbit web interface in it where they are entering information into the Fitbit interface but within our app.   

We are working with a client that is interesting in the Fitbit integration, but doesn't necessarily want to spend the time developing interfaces for what Fitbit may already have built.  Dropping an existing Fitbit web experience into our native app would take less time than if we developed a set of UI's that would talk to the Fitbit API.    If that makes sense?

I am just seeing if this is something that even exists within the Fitbit ecosystem.  

Drew

[JohnFitbit]

@drewauman I believe the use of WebViews for accessing Fitbit UI through your native application might be prohibited since we don't allow it during the consent flow. I'm not sure if allowing Fitbit user's to create logs through a WebView is supported, but I can double check.

[drewauman]

Hi John,

Thanks for the reply.   We have no issue in following the specifications around how authentication would need to work with oAuth and PKCE (Not having the auth flow embeded into the app, etc), but once authenticated we were wondering if we could then pass a launch token or something to the web side of things and have the user use the Fitbit tools, but in a web view within our app.    Just trying to give our user base a more cohesive experience between our health tools and Fitbit's tools.   I know we could develop our own interfaces against the Fitbit API, but since Fitbit already has interfaces around these tools, we were looking for a happy medium where we could leverage the web interfaces (maybe save some time on our side) that are already out there.    Let me know if that makes sense.

Drew

[JohnFitbit]

@drewauman Thanks for providing me with additional clarification. I'll follow up with the engineering to see if this is a functionality we support. I'll update you when I have more information.

Thanks for your patience!

[drewauman]

Thanks so much John!   I appreciate the insights and help!   Let me know if anyone would like more information, as I could hop on a call to describe what we are looking to do in any level of detail needed.  

Thanks again!

Drew

[JohnFitbit]

@drewauman I've received some updates from the team, and it looks like there aren't any immediate concerns with allowing your users to log Fitbit data through the use of a WebView within your native application.

However, we don't have any recommendations of how you can build this out, so you'll have to do the research on your own for this. As long as you keep the authorization flow out of the WebView, there shouldn't be any red flags.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any additional questions.

[drewauman]

@JohnFitbit Thanks for the follow up John.  I appreciate you running this down for us.   I have reviewed the API documentation on how to do authentication against the Fitbit API (oAuth + PKCE), the gap I have is once we have a valid token it is not clear how we might pass that token over to the Fitbit web experience so that the user is essentially logged into the web site in our web view without having to send them through the web login.

Any suggestions on how we would research this?  I wouldn't want to build something against the web experience that Fitbit is not aware of, is my concern.  It could become brittle if the fitbit team is making changes to their web experience without knowledge of us using it in this way.   Further thoughts on that front? 

I appreciate all your time John!  You have been a great help!

Drew  

[JohnFitbit]

@drewauman I'm not an expert on this, but based on the recommended WebView alternatives in the documentation, you can use Android Chrome Custom Tabs for Android applications or Safari View Controller for IOS apps instead of a WebView. These alternatives give apps more control over their web experience, and make transitions between native and web content more seamless without having to resort to a WebView.

I've only read up on the Android implementation and I think it'll meet your project needs. There is also a GitHub sample provided within the documentation to see if the functionality will fit your project needs.