Users need better feedback in case of authentication failure

Oct 16, 2015 13:35 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu developers are working on fixing a problem with authentication failure notifications for online accounts that's been affecting the mobile platform.

One of the first things that were implemented in Ubuntu Touch was the ability to add various online accounts. The most important of them were, of course, Google and Gmail. Due to some errors with account-polld, it looks like things are not stellar, and that people even had issues with the authentication itself. It might not seem like a big problem, but a lot of users rely on this important online functionality of the phone.

In fact, account-polld is one of the few things that run on the phone even when the user doesn't actively use the device, so the issues seem to go a little bit deeper. Developers have been talking about how to fix this problem and they need some feedback from other devs and the community.

Online Account authentication failures should provide some feedback

The problem is that people don't usually know when such a failure has happened, so developers are working to make sure that people notice this issue more easily.

"Today I had a long discussion with Jonas Drange on IRC about handling authentication failures for online accounts better. This has come to our awareness because we've recently had some account-polld issues related to that. In all cases, account authentication stopped working for some reason, and account-polld kept trying to re-authenticate the accounts forever. One example for this was when the user changed his password," wrote developer Niklas Wenzel.

One of the proposed solutions is to offer users some feedback, but it remains to be discussed how that will happen. Ubuntu Touch is set to get a new OTA update in the coming day, but this is an important modification, so it won't land in this cycle.