Linked Account Sign-In for Android

Linked Account Sign-In enables One Tap Sign In With Google for users that already have their Google Account linked to your service. This improves the experience for users as they can sign in with one click, without re-entering their username and password. It also reduces the chances of users creating duplicate accounts on your service.

Linked Account Sign-In is available as part of the One Tap Sign-In flow for Android. This means you don't need to import a separate library if your app already has the One Tap feature enabled.

In this document, you will learn how to modify your Android app to support Linked Account Sign-In.

How it works

You opt in to show linked accounts during the One Tap Sign-In flow.
If the user is signed in on Google and has linked their Google Account with their account on your service, an ID token will be returned for the linked account.
The user is shown a One Tap sign-in prompt with an option to sign in to your service with their linked account.
If the user chooses to continue with the linked account, the user's ID token is returned to your app. You match this against the token that was sent to your server in step 2 to identify the logged in user.

Setup

Set up your development environment

Get the latest Google Play services on your development host:

Open the Android SDK Manager.

Under SDK Tools, find Google Play services.
If the status for these packages is not Installed, select them both and click Install Packages.

Configure your app

In your project-level build.gradle file, include Google's Maven repository in both your buildscript and allprojects sections.
```
buildscript {
    repositories {
        google()
    }
}

allprojects {
    repositories {
        google()
    }
}
```
Add the dependencies for the "Link with Google" API to your module's app-level gradle file, which is usually app/build.gradle:
```
dependencies {
  implementation 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-auth:21.3.0'
}
```

Modify your Android app to support Linked Account Sign-In

At the end of the Linked Account Sign-In flow, an ID token is returned to your app. The ID token's integrity should be verified before signing the user in.

The following code sample details the steps to retrieve, verify the ID token, and subsequently sign the user in.

Create an activity to receive the result of the Sign-In intent

Kotlin

  private val activityResultLauncher = registerForActivityResult(
    ActivityResultContracts.StartIntentSenderForResult()) { result ->
    if (result.resultCode == RESULT_OK) {
      try {
        val signInCredentials = Identity.signInClient(this)
                                .signInCredentialFromIntent(result.data)
        // Review the Verify the integrity of the ID token section for
        // details on how to verify the ID token
        verifyIdToken(signInCredential.googleIdToken)
      } catch (e: ApiException) {
        Log.e(TAG, "Sign-in failed with error code:", e)
      }
    } else {
      Log.e(TAG, "Sign-in failed")
    }
  }

Java

  private final ActivityResultLauncher<IntentSenderResult>
    activityResultLauncher = registerForActivityResult(
    new ActivityResultContracts.StartIntentSenderForResult(),
    result -> {
    If (result.getResultCode() == RESULT_OK) {
        try {
          SignInCredential signInCredential = Identity.getSignInClient(this)
                         .getSignInCredentialFromIntent(result.getData());
          verifyIdToken(signInCredential.getGoogleIdToken());
        } catch (e: ApiException ) {
          Log.e(TAG, "Sign-in failed with error:", e)
        }
    } else {
        Log.e(TAG, "Sign-in failed")
    }
});

Build the sign in request

Kotlin

private val tokenRequestOptions =
GoogleIdTokenRequestOptions.Builder()
  .supported(true)
  // Your server's client ID, not your Android client ID.
  .serverClientId(getString("your-server-client-id")
  .filterByAuthorizedAccounts(true)
  .associateLinkedAccounts("service-id-of-and-defined-by-developer",
                           scopes)
  .build()

Java

 private final GoogleIdTokenRequestOptions tokenRequestOptions =
     GoogleIdTokenRequestOptions.Builder()
  .setSupported(true)
  .setServerClientId("your-service-client-id")
  .setFilterByAuthorizedAccounts(true)
  .associateLinkedAccounts("service-id-of-and-defined-by-developer",
                            scopes)
  .build()

Launch the Sign-In Pending intent

Kotlin

 Identity.signInClient(this)
    .beginSignIn(
  BeginSignInRequest.Builder()
    .googleIdTokenRequestOptions(tokenRequestOptions)
  .build())
    .addOnSuccessListener{result ->
      activityResultLauncher.launch(result.pendingIntent.intentSender)
  }
  .addOnFailureListener {e ->
    Log.e(TAG, "Sign-in failed because:", e)
  }

Java

 Identity.getSignInClient(this)
  .beginSignIn(
    BeginSignInRequest.Builder()
      .setGoogleIdTokenRequestOptions(tokenRequestOptions)
      .build())
  .addOnSuccessListener(result -> {
    activityResultLauncher.launch(
        result.getPendingIntent().getIntentSender());
})
.addOnFailureListener(e -> {
  Log.e(TAG, "Sign-in failed because:", e);
});

Verify the integrity of the ID token

To verify that the token is valid, ensure that the following criteria are satisfied:

The ID token is properly signed by Google. Use Google's public keys (available in JWK or PEM format) to verify the token's signature. These keys are regularly rotated; examine the Cache-Control header in the response to determine when you should retrieve them again.
The value of aud in the ID token is equal to one of your app's client IDs. This check is necessary to prevent ID tokens issued to a malicious app being used to access data about the same user on your app's backend server.
The value of iss in the ID token is equal to accounts.google.com or https://accounts.google.com.
The expiry time (exp) of the ID token has not passed.
If you need to validate that the ID token represents a Google Workspace or Cloud organization account, you can check the hd claim, which indicates the hosted domain of the user. This must be used when restricting access to a resource to only members of certain domains. The absence of this claim indicates that the account does not belong to a Google hosted domain.

Using the email, email_verified and hd fields, you can determine if Google hosts and is authoritative for an email address. In the cases where Google is authoritative, the user is known to be the legitimate account owner, and you may skip password or other challenge methods.

Cases where Google is authoritative:

email has a @gmail.com suffix, this is a Gmail account.
email_verified is true and hd is set, this is a G Suite account.

Users may register for Google Accounts without using Gmail or G Suite. When email does not contain a @gmail.com suffix and hd is absent, Google is not authoritative and password or other challenge methods are recommended to verify the user. email_verified can also be true as Google initially verified the user when the Google account was created, however ownership of the third party email account may have since changed.

Rather than writing your own code to perform these verification steps, we strongly recommend using a Google API client library for your platform, or a general-purpose JWT library. For development and debugging, you can call our tokeninfo validation endpoint.

Use a Google API Client Library

Using the Java Google API Client Library is the recommended way to validate Google ID tokens in a production environment.

Java

  import com.google.api.client.googleapis.auth.oauth2.GoogleIdToken;
  import com.google.api.client.googleapis.auth.oauth2.GoogleIdToken.Payload;
  import com.google.api.client.googleapis.auth.oauth2.GoogleIdTokenVerifier;

  ...

  GoogleIdTokenVerifier verifier = new GoogleIdTokenVerifier.Builder(transport, jsonFactory)
      // Specify the CLIENT_ID of the app that accesses the backend:
      .setAudience(Collections.singletonList(CLIENT_ID))
      // Or, if multiple clients access the backend:
      //.setAudience(Arrays.asList(CLIENT_ID_1, CLIENT_ID_2, CLIENT_ID_3))
      .build();

  // (Receive idTokenString by HTTPS POST)

  GoogleIdToken idToken = verifier.verify(idTokenString);
  if (idToken != null) {
    Payload payload = idToken.getPayload();

    // Print user identifier
    String userId = payload.getSubject();
    System.out.println("User ID: " + userId);

    // Get profile information from payload
    String email = payload.getEmail();
    boolean emailVerified = Boolean.valueOf(payload.getEmailVerified());
    String name = (String) payload.get("name");
    String pictureUrl = (String) payload.get("picture");
    String locale = (String) payload.get("locale");
    String familyName = (String) payload.get("family_name");
    String givenName = (String) payload.get("given_name");

    // Use or store profile information
    // ...

  } else {
    System.out.println("Invalid ID token.");
  }

The GoogleIdTokenVerifier.verify() method verifies the JWT signature, the aud claim, the iss claim, and themexp claim.

If you need to validate that the ID token represents a Google Workspace or Cloud organization account, you can verify the hd claim by checking the domain name returned by the Payload.getHostedDomain() method.

Calling the tokeninfo endpoint

An easy way to validate an ID token signature for debugging is to use the tokeninfo endpoint. Calling this endpoint involves an additional network request that does most of the validation for you while you test proper validation and payload extraction in your own code. It is not suitable for use in production code as requests may be throttled or otherwise subject to intermittent errors.

To validate an ID token using the tokeninfo endpoint, make an HTTPS POST or GET request to the endpoint, and pass your ID token in the id_token parameter. For example, to validate the token "XYZ123", make the following GET request:

https://oauth2.googleapis.com/tokeninfo?id_token=XYZ123

If the token is properly signed and the iss and exp claims have the expected values, you will get a HTTP 200 response, where the body contains the JSON-formatted ID token claims. Here's an example response:

{
 // These six fields are included in all Google ID Tokens.
 "iss": "https://accounts.google.com",
 "sub": "110169484474386276334",
 "azp": "1008719970978-hb24n2dstb40o45d4feuo2ukqmcc6381.apps.googleusercontent.com",
 "aud": "1008719970978-hb24n2dstb40o45d4feuo2ukqmcc6381.apps.googleusercontent.com",
 "iat": "1433978353",
 "exp": "1433981953",

 // These seven fields are only included when the user has granted the "profile" and
 // "email" OAuth scopes to the application.
 "email": "testuser@gmail.com",
 "email_verified": "true",
 "name" : "Test User",
 "picture": "https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-kYgzyAWpZzJ/ABCDEFGHI/AAAJKLMNOP/tIXL9Ir44LE/s99-c/photo.jpg",
 "given_name": "Test",
 "family_name": "User",
 "locale": "en"
}

Warning: Once you get these claims, you still need to check that the aud claim contains one of your app's client IDs. If it does, then the token is both valid and intended for your client, and you can safely retrieve and use the user's unique Google ID from the sub claim.

If you need to validate that the ID token represents a Google Workspace account, you can check the hd claim, which indicates the hosted domain of the user. This must be used when restricting access to a resource to only members of certain domains. The absence of this claim indicates that the account does not belong to a Google Workspace hosted domain.