Facebook integration with Xamarin.Social

Question

I'm currently evaluating different alternatives to integrate my iOS app with Facebook. Since I'll be porting the app to Android later, Xamarin.Social seems like an interesting alternative. However, the documentation is a little sparse, and judging by the amount and relevance of my Google searches, there doesn't seem to be a lot of experience with it.

From what I have gathered so far, it seems that Xamarin.Social, and Xamarin.Auth which it depends on, have it's own AccountStore for storing Facebook (and other social services) accounts that integrates with the iOS KeyChain, which leads me to my qestions:

• Is the Xamarin.Social AccountStore and the native ACAccountStore integrated in any way? Or does it even wrap all of the native Facebook APIs?
• From what I've read, the native Facebook APIs handle re-authentication when an access token is expired. So if you can access an account in the ACAccountStore, you don't need to worry about it. Does Xamarin.Social also handle refresh of access tokens, or does this need to be handled manually?
• I'm not going to use any of the compose views. I just need the access token of the Facebook account, and my server will do the rest of the Facebook integration. Based on this, should I be looking at other APIs instead? Are the full Facebook APIs overkill for my usage?

Edit:

Another question. What use had the RedirectUrl property of the FacebookService, if I'm using GetAuthenticationUI to present the login view?

Thanks for your input.

Answer 1

After playing around with it for a while, here are my findings:

• It does not share accounts with the native Facebook/Twitter integration
• It does provide means to authenticate if you have no account, and you attempt to invoke the share UI. I have not been able to test this for expired tokens yet, but I assume it will handle this as well.

Unfortunately, the UI looks terrible compared to the native UI. But it does work, so if the looks is not that important, it seems like a viable cross platform alternative.

Update

Later versions have a Twitter5Service that integrates with the iOS Social Framework. But none of the other services uses any native authentication and share UIs.

Answer 2

ACAccountStore is wrapped on top of Account, so yes,

https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Auth/blob/master/src/Xamarin.Auth.iOS/ACAccountWrapper.cs

You will see it stores 3 keys, Username, Expires and Token value.