Online Accounts Portal

[edfloreshz]

Hey all,

I'd like to propose a new portal and get some feedback. This is still pretty early, so I'm mostly trying to figure out if the overall direction makes sense before I go further.

Right now, every desktop has its own online accounts system, but each one has entirely different D-Bus interfaces. They use completely independent architectures, service names, and object paths.

The idea is a portal for online account authentication. Like other portals, it would rely on the desktop's own backend (GNOME Online Accounts, KDE's accounts framework, etc...) to do the actual authentication and hold the refresh token in its keyring. The portal itself would only pass the app a short-lived, service-specific access token. It could also support app grants, giving the user granular control over which apps can access what, with a way to revoke that access.

Goals

• List the account providers the user has set up, organized by capability.
• Let an application request access to an account for a given service, have the user confirm it, and give the app a way to make authenticated requests.
• Let the user see and revoke per-app grants.

Non-goals

• Setting up or modifying accounts, that stays in each desktop's settings app.
• Acting as a general secret store or handling passkeys, that's the Credentials portal's job.