Getting Android owner's email address nicely

Question

I want to allow the user to provide me their email address without typing it in. Ideally, there'd be a text field where the user could either type an email address or push a button to autofill it.

In an earlier question, Roman Nurik suggests using an AccountManager to handle this, but that requires my app to use the GET_ACCOUNTS privilege; my app could then access all of the user's accounts on the device, including their Facebook/Twitter accounts. That permission seems way too broad for what I want.

Is there a nicer way to handle this that doesn't require granting my app such a heavy duty permission?

Answer 1

I know I'm way too late, but this might be useful to others.

I think the best way to auto-populate an email field now is by using AccountPicker

If your app has the GET_ACCOUNTS permission and there's only one account, you get it right away. If your app doesn't have it, or if there are more than one account, users get a prompt so they can authorize or not the action.

Your app needs to include the Google Play Services auth library com.google.android.gms:play-services-auth but it doesn't need any permissions.

This whole process will fail on older versions of Android (2.2+ is required), or if Google Play is not available so you should consider that case.

Here's a basic code sample:

    private static final int REQUEST_CODE_EMAIL = 1;
    private TextView email = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.email);

    // ...

    try {
        Intent intent = AccountPicker.newChooseAccountIntent(null, null,
                new String[] { GoogleAuthUtil.GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_TYPE }, false, null, null, null, null);
        startActivityForResult(intent, REQUEST_CODE_EMAIL);
    } catch (ActivityNotFoundException e) {
        // TODO
    }

    // ...

    @Override
    protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
        if (requestCode == REQUEST_CODE_EMAIL && resultCode == RESULT_OK) {
            String accountName = data.getStringExtra(AccountManager.KEY_ACCOUNT_NAME);
            email.setText(accountName);
        }
    }

Answer 2

Indeed, not only can't you do this without GET_ACCOUNTS, the information you want only exists in the user's (Google) account data.

On my Sprint phone, the 'owner' address sprint assigns is [email protected], and that can be seen using getprop from a shell. But that's not my primary email address, or even one I ever use/check. What you want is my gmail address, and that's stored in the Android account data.

Actually, you want one of the two — which is another reason you need GET_ACCOUNTS. If you're going to ask for my email address, you need to let me select among the two @gmail.com accounts I have configured on the device. I know which one is my 'preferred' one (although even that's contextual), but AFAIK neither is considered by the system to be more 'primary' or 'default' than the other.

Answer 3

An alternative approach might be to find the Google username associated with the device, from which you can reconstruct a [email protected] address, but that still requires use of the AccountManager. See Accessing Google Account Id /username via Android.

Answer 4

As the accepted answer is deprecated, you can use new approach:

val result = registerForActivityResult(ActivityResultContracts.StartActivityForResult()) {

    if (it.resultCode == Activity.RESULT_OK) {
        val accountName = it.data?.getStringExtra(AccountManager.KEY_ACCOUNT_NAME)
    }
}

val options = AccountChooserOptions.Builder()       
    .setAlwaysShowAccountPicker(true)
    .build()

result.launch(AccountPicker.newChooseAccountIntent(options))

Answer 5

There is no nice way to access the user's account (e-mail) information without asking for the GET_ACCOUNTS permission. :-)