Announcing OpenYOLO: the Power of a Password Manager for Your Android Apps

Developers: OpenYOLO is ready for your application! Seamlessly add the power of password managers right into your app. If you are an Android developer and you lose too many people in the sign up/in process of your application, you’ll want to read this.

What is OpenYOLO?

OpenYOLO is authentication made easy and secure. You may recall Dashlane and Google launched the collaborative OpenYOLO project last year. As described at the time by Google’s Iain McGinniss, the goal of the partnership was to “help create a new open standard for app authentication.”

Over the last year, Dashlane has worked alongside Google and other password managers on the project to bring the best possible sign-in experience into your Android application.

Even before the availability of OpenYOLO, Dashlane has been helping users log into your apps faster, and easier – giving them the right credential at the right time and reducing abandoned logins and password resets. Earlier this year, I detailed the history of how Dashlane’s password manager does autofill for Android apps.

And on Google’s side, they made the SmartLock API so that users could retrieve credentials they had stored in Chrome. That was an important first step, but not open to other password managers (preferred by users) such as Dashlane.

Now, more and more Android app users rely on the security and convenience of a password manager.  Password managers are a well-known best practice to make sure users have unique and secure passwords for every service.  So, Google has embraced the open standard to make it easier for Android app developers to query the password manager chosen by the user instead of forcing the user to remember or search for the proper credential.  The result?  Happier, more secure users and fewer lost signups and logins.

How do you get OpenYOLO for your app?

Dashlane is at the DroidConUK Android conference today and we’re proud to say that our collaboration is now live and ready for developers.  Iain McGinniss, from the Google Identity Platform team, was just on stage at the conference to announce the new API and how it will progressively replace the Google SmartLock API. Later tonight, engineers from Dashlane, Google, and others will be at a Meetup hosted at the Google office in London to talk with developers and help them integrate OpenYOLO within their applications.

Best of all, the project is open-source and sponsored by the OpenID Foundation, so it is freely available for everyone to use and explore.