Right. Do all of those dumb dialogs that allow you to sign in using your Google account, import data from one cloud to another, add integrations from third party providers to other apps… they are all solving problems you don’t have?

OAuth is one of that pieces of infrastructure that power lots of things without people even noticing them, but don’t bode well with armchair engineers.

I'm an application develop who uses oauth, but it's only one in many authentication systems I've used, and certainly one of the worst.

Which highlights the very problem I was talking about, considering OAuth is an authorization protocol, not one for authentication…

Which others have you used which solves similar problems, but better?

Genuinely curious.

Well, I use oauth only for authentication (IE, use it to get a trusted email address for the web user of my app), not authorization. Of all the systems I've used, kerberos has been the best authn solution, then basic auth to log in as a user where authorization is done in another ACL system (FS acls, for example).

My complaints are almost entirely about the ergonomics of writing oauth code in a server, provisioning the resources to make it work (like DNS), and then debugging 900 redirect_uri errors.