"account needs updating" message is confusing

asked 2014-05-04 10:57:20 +0200

dsilveira gravatar image

updated 2014-05-19 18:43:49 +0200

Every once in a while I get the message in the Title, which is totally criptic, and useless, because when you click on it there's nothing you can do to update it or whatever! Only solution I found so far was rebooting :P

Does somebody know what this is? And how to get around it?

EDIT: In fact if you re-enter your credentials it usually solves it,

so I believe this is a question of confusing message, just say, account credentials expired, or authentication lost for account, or something informative like this!

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In my case it was the Gmail account where I needed to fill in my credentials once more(every week).

BonoNL ( 2014-05-04 21:52:32 +0200 )edit

thanks @Low, you're hired you has counselor, get your couch ready :D

dsilveira ( 2014-05-05 15:22:09 +0200 )edit

you're right @BonoNL, re-entering my credentials, worked, but why would I need to re-enter my credentials, if they are the same? This just doesn't make sense to me, and the message in the notification is totally clueless :P

dsilveira ( 2014-05-05 15:24:06 +0200 )edit
2

The device uses OAuth2 for authentication with Google (and other services). In OAuth2, the device never knows or stores your username or password - instead, the user fills out those details in a webview which gets sent only to Google, and then Google sends the device an Access Token. It is this Access Token which is then used as credentials by the device software.

In some circumstances, the Access Token can become invalidated (for example, it can expire, or it can be revoked if Google believe that it is being used inappropriately -- eg, changing country often might cause this).

There have been several bugs found (and most of them have been fixed, as of the upcoming update) where Sailfish OS software erroneously thinks that the Access Token has been invalidated when actually the error can be for some other reason (eg, network connectivity problem), and this, in the past, could cause this notification to be sent to the user. Hopefully most of the cases which cause this to happen will have been fixed in the upcoming update.

Regarding the fact that the notification is somewhat opaque to the user, this is a known issue, which will be addressed in the future by opening the appropriate Account Settings page when the notification is clicked, but some work is required to make this happen, yet.

Cheers, Chris.

chris.adams ( 2014-05-16 08:42:31 +0200 )edit

I praise that this is being addressed, both the bugs, and the opaqueness.

I'll just say that first and foremost, the message should be more informative, more clear. For instance, instead of account needs updating? - only now starting to have an idea of what that means, just say, account credentials expired, or authentication lost for account, or something informative like this!

Cheers

dsilveira ( 2014-05-16 16:01:07 +0200 )edit