Introducing Google Sign In for PPResume

Xiao Hanyu,•GoogleOAuthPasswordlessSSOLogto
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Introduction

I am super excited to announce that PPResume supports Google Sign In starting from Feb 20, 2024. You can simply sign in PPResume with your Google account. This is a great addon to further simplify the sign in process after we introduced the new auth flow powered by logto.

Let’s take a quick look first:

Google Sign In Google Sign In OAuth Consent

Why Google Sign In

People hate passwords. They hate creating new accounts when they want to try out a new product. They hate memorizing strong, complicated passwords. They hate resetting passwords. They hate resetting a new password and being told that they can’t use a previous password. They hate being warned about the danger of using a simple password on different websites. They hate typing out passwords. They hate typing out email addresses. They hate typing anything.

Yes, there are password managers. But very few people use them. People are lazy, they are not willing to pay for a password manager and invest time to learn how to use a password manager.

A friend of mine told me that he will immediately leaves a website if he has to create an account by entering an email address and a password

A study shows that “92% of users will leave a site instead of resetting or recovering login info”.

Life is hard and we should not make it any harder as SaaS makers.

Mathilda: “Is life always this hard, or is it just when you’re a kid?”

Léon: “Always like this.”

— Léon: The Professional

What most people really want is a one-click button that allows them to sign in with their existing social account. This can be a Google account, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a Linkedin account, or any other social account they already have.

So the question is, which social sign in provider should we support first? The data speaks for itself!

logto=> select count(*) from users where created_at < '2024-02-20 09:46:16.660978+00';
 count
-------
   227
(1 row)
 
logto=> select count(*) from users where created_at < '2024-02-20 09:46:16.660978+00' and primary_email ilike '%gmail%';
 count
-------
   102
(1 row)

Out of 227 users, 102 users use Gmail as their primary email address, which is 45% of all users. This is a very strong signal that we should support Google Sign In first.

Account Linking

Before we integrate social sign in, there is one caveat we need to think about carefully. Imagine the following scenario:

This kind of scenario would be a disaster for the user experience. At first Andy would be very upset, he might think that all his data is lost because he got a new account via Google Sign In. He then signs out and tries to sign in with his email/password, and finds that everything is still there and nothing is lost. Andy finally realizes that he has two accounts with the same email address:

When supporting more social sign in options, users may have more than two accounts with the same email. How stupid and ridiculous is that!

Ideally, Andy should get the same account whether he signs in via email/password or Google Sign In, as long as the email address is the same. We need “account linking” here, which allows users to associate different sign in methods to the same account.

Fortunately, logto supports account linking out of the box.

Google Sign In Account Linking

Increased Conversion

Social sign-in can significantly increase conversion rate, with studies showing an average improvement of 20–40%. The case of PPResume has confirmed this. Again, the data speaks for itself!

logto=> select count(*) from users where created_at > '2024-02-20 09:46:16.660978+00';
 count
-------
    64
(1 row)
 
logto=> select count(*) from users where created_at > '2024-02-20 09:46:16.660978+00' and primary_email ilike '%gmail%';
 count
-------
    54
(1 row)
 
logto=> select count(*) from users where created_at > '2024-02-20 09:46:16.660978+00' and primary_email ilike '%gmail%' and avatar != '';
 count
-------
    52
(1 row)

Since the launch of Google Sign In on Feb 20, we have 54 out of 64 new users signing in with Gmail, and 52 out of 54 Gmail users are using Google Sign In. Compared to before, 45% of users are using Gmail. Now 85% of new users use Gmail, and 93% of Gmail users sign in directly with their Google account. Not to mention that some non-Gmail users have also signed in with their Google account. Very impressive, isn’t it?

The Implementation

As described in previous post, it is difficult to build your own auth solution from scratch, and it is not a good idea to do so.

Surely you can build a coursework level demo auth solution yourself with email/password sign in and integrate many social sign-in providers with the help of OAuth libraries—for example, NextAuth.js is a very good library for Next.js.

How would you then implement account linking? To implement account linking, you need to have email address verified; to have email address verified, you must have a way to generate OTPs and send OTPs to the users; to send OTPs to the users, you need to do research to find a good email delivery service, Mailgun, SendGrid, just to name a few. You will not want set up the email delivery yourself and then warm up your home made email delivery service, will you? Come on, you are no superman. Last but not least, different social sign in providers may return different responses for user profiles and you will need to santize the response and map it to your own user model.

To summarize, do not waste time building your own auth from scratch, adopt a professional dedicated auth solution instead.

I chose logto as PPResume’s auth solution, and logto supports account linking with multiple social sign in providers out of the box.

Other auth solutions like auth0, clerk also support account linking out of the box, you can make a choice according to your preference.

To integrate Google Sign In, simply add a new social connector to Google and follow the official guide to complete the setup.

Please note that if you are building a SaaS product for the public, you need to submit your app to Google for a review. It can take weeks to get a response but in my case I got approval from Google within 2 days of submitting all the required information.

Logto Google Connector Item Logto Google Connector Detail

Of course you can also integrate other social sign in providers such as Apple, Facebook, Github etc. However, it is not recommended to integrate too many social sign-in providers.

Logto Social Connectors List

Final Words about OAuth

Last, I want to talk a bit more about OAuth, from an engineer’s perspective. Most of the social sign in providers use OAuth protocol under the hood.

For me，OAuth is a very complicated protocol. I’ve read the book Getting Started with OAuth 2.0 page by page, but still every time I need to do OAuth related work, I have to read many documents again and again, just to refresh my memory.

Robin Guldener’s post Why is OAuth still hard in 2023? did a great job of pointing out the complications of OAuth protocol, highly recommended to read it if you want to go with the hard way and implement an OAuth based auth flow by yourself.

Conclusion

OK time’s up. For all SaaS makers that needs to implement the auth flow, I suggest:

  1. do not build you own auth from scratch when possible, 90% it would be waste of time
  2. choose a professional dedicated auth solution carefully, because it is crucial and critical for the entire lifecycle of your SaaS product
  3. integrate 1-2 social sign in providers, make sure the auth solution supports account linking, which would increase the conversion rate significantly
  4. keep plain email/password sign in as a fallback, as some users may not have social accounts or they may not want to use social sign in for some reasons

Thanks for reading.

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