Should I use login based user authentication in my android app

Question

I am writing a main application that interacts with a web service that I am writing using AppEngine. I was wondering what the consequences are with login-based authentication and server-side user management.

I know the benefits of a business, knowing your users, and since I plan to ultimately create custom content in the service, I understand that in the end I will have to add it.

Now I'm more worried about the technical aspects of adding this feature. What are the development and maintenance costs for adding these services right now or adding them at a later point in time, that is, when the data store is already full with some "anonymous" data, and not the user history is saved?

I know this is a vague question, so I will try to quantize the situation. Let's say we have an application that allows users to search neighborhoods for restaurants. An application only needs to send a restaurant type, say, "Chinese" to the service? The application is popular and receives 100 thousand users. Now we want to add the favorites system. Would it be better if we added it from the beginning or is it better to wait to get some user and then add functions?

The underlying concept here is also the value that users attribute to personalized experience, and it would be great to get some ideas from experienced application developers.

Answer 1

It seems appropriate to build your system from scratch using an internal unique identifier to segment user data. To get started, simply use a unique identifier for authentication, and then add the login-based scheme later.

I recently deployed my own api-based authentication system using GAE, and one of my biggest regrets was not biting the bullet and did it before. However, if the context guarantees (i.e. you want to test the concept and see how it resonates), I would say that you are safe with an extensible approach like the one I described.