Completing your Google OAuth verification is not a walk in the park. There are several picky steps involved. One of the bigger ones is creating a demo video that shows the user experience with the contact picker and Google Contacts.
The main reason this is tricky is that you’ll need to create a screencast of the user experience and you need to show all the things that Google wants to see. It requires resetting your Google Account before you record and resizing your popup window at the right moment.
If you send them a video that doesn’t tick all the boxes, you’ll need to start again.
So it’s worth the effort to get right the first time.
What’s the Problem with my First Video?
If there is something they don’t like about it, they’ll send a cryptic email like this:
We reviewed the demo video for your project and we found that it doesn’t follow all our requirements.
Demo Video Requirements
- OAuth Consent Screen shows the App Name.
- URL bar of the OAuth Consent Screen shows the Client ID for your project, which contains the project number [your-project-id] (This is not required for native Android and iOS apps).
- Video shows the OAuth grant process that users will go through.
- Video Shows how data is accessed on each OAuth client
One or more of these issues applies to your OAuth project. Your challenge is to find out which one.
Most commonly, the issue is that the video you created doesn’t show Google the things that they are looking for. Part of the challenge with their video request is that they want to see more than what a typical user will demonstrate. They need you to go through the user’s experience, yes. But they also need you to highlight some technical details that typical users are blissfully unaware of.
Fixing It
Most often, there are two things you can do fix the video:
No Skipping Steps
Before you start to record, visit your Google permissions page and “Remove Access” for your application.
This ensures that you don’t skip the OAuth flow if you already gave your app access to your Google Contacts. That’s important because Google wants to see each step.
Resize Your Popup Window
Just after clicking on Google Contacts in the contact picker, resize your popup window so that is it as wide as possible.
The popup window is typically just wide enough to show the consent pages. Making the page wider lets Google verify your client_id in the address bar.
More Depth
If these solutions didn’t address the issue for you, don’t worry! We have an article that will help to set you straight.
Learn more about successfully creating a Google OAuth demo video here.
Whether or not this article helped you, we’d love to hear about it. Drop us a line and let us know.