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I have an app extension for Sharing (Share Extension) and when a user selects my app to share an image, my app will send that image to a server.

The problem is that the server requires an authenticated identity (AWS Cognito) to send the object to the server. Since I cannot share Authentication from my main app to my extension and I don't want to have the user sign in every time they want to share, I'm stuck.

I can see this being done with messaging apps where a user sends a message from a share extension. I'm not sure how they achieve this. Since the user is not asked to login again in the extension, somehow the credentials are either being shared with the extension or the app is momentarily launched to perform that upload while remaining in the background (not sure this is possible).

So my question is what is the approach I should be using. Should the extension somehow be directing the main app to upload the image or should I figure a way of sharing the access tokens with the extension in a secure way and accessing them without any user action?

alionthego
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  • Assuming your authentication results in a session token, you would save that in a shared keychain item where it can be accessed by your share extension. – Paulw11 Nov 20 '21 at 03:21

1 Answers1

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The solution is to setup a shared container for the app & the extension, please see "Sharing data with your containing app" section in this article: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/ExtensionScenarios.html#:~:text=To%20enable%20data%20sharing%2C%20use,App%20to%20an%20App%20Group.

Kyle L
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