I have an app in sandbox mode and I have a sandbox user that is pending. (It has also been at least a day since the user was added). The user can successfully use my app and has given authorization; however, the user's likes returns an empty response (I know they can only access liked media from other authorized sandbox users, but the user has liked media from my account that is set as the admin). The Instagram API documentation states that the user may go to their developer site and accept/decline sandbox invites from the Sandbox Invites tab except my user is shown the developer register page instead. Does anyone know what is going on/how to fix this?
Instagram made sweeping changes to it's API and the way it is accessed recently. As a result of the lockdown the Sandbox Invite process is glitchy at best. I myself just ran into this issue of invites not showing up.
It seems, for the moment, the only way to access the invite is to fill out the developer form(I just used a http://localhost:8000 URL and a random phone number that is not likely to exist, although try without one as it might not be necessary). That should automatically forward you to the invite page where the invited user can then accept or decline a Sandbox Invite.
It's a bit of a mess and the lack of documentation / indication to indicate that this step is mandatory doesn't help matters. Hope this helps save some time and headaches!
Related
I have written an app which notifies users when someone make them unfollow (As like as any other apps in this area). Then, I got my app approved by Instagram. After six/seven attempts, they don't approve the app till now. I followed their instructions as feedback and fixed any probable privacy problem which my app might have. But I didn't get any bright answer from them as far.
I throw my app on the following use case:
My product helps brands and advertisers understand, manage their
audience and media rights.
And I wrote my API use cases as follows:
Thank you for considering our request to approve our application. The
required information for enabling live mode for our application is
explained in the following lines:
Q1: How your app does use the Instagram API?
First of all, our user (i.e. brands or advertisers) selects the “Unfollow Finder Service” on our application.
We redirect the user to Instagram login page, as indicated in API documentation, to authorize his account to accessing required scopes.
i. Note that we already told the user everything that we are going to
use.
We tend to call follow APIs whenever the authorized user clicks a button in our application.
Ultimately, we inform the authorized user with the information obtained from step 3.
Q2: How does it fall into one of the approved use cases?
The list of users who recently unfollowed/followed an
Instagram account are definitely crucial and beneficial for the brands
and advertisers on Instagram. In this way, they can get feedback
implicitly from their customers. Our service help them to manage their
audiences and provide better content for them. So, according to Q1,
our use case falls into “My product helps brands and advertisers
understand, manage their audience and media rights.” We never violate
the approved scopes and Instagram's privacy.
Q3: Who will be using your app?
In our region, lots of brands and businesses utilize
Instagram to publish their content. They are the users of our service
and can use it to improve their relation with their audiences. Kind
regards,
As you see, I'm trying to tell them everything in detail. But in my last submission, they declined me with the following feedback:
General issues:
Policy Violation ("Like", "Follow", "Comment" Exchange Program): Your
app shouldn't participate, enable or promote any “like”, “share”,
“comment” or “follower” exchange programs. In working to build a high
quality platform experience, we ask that you comply with our Platform
Policy (http://wwww.instagram.com/about/legal/terms/api/).
I just want permission on follower_list scope from them. The surprising part is that they noted me with almost irrelevant feedback. It seems that they do not want to approve my app at all.
Do I violate their privacy?
Does anyone face this problem? How can I fix it and had my app approved?
Sorry for asking this question here since I almost googled entire web (+Stackoverflow) and find no helpful answer. All of my previous attempts were gone away.
Thanks in advance.
I want to pull likes and comments from any account that I specify. Can this be done with the Instagram API or do you have to have the accounts permissions to pull this info.
Essentially I want to be able to analyze this data without having log in credentials for the account.
Thanks!
Following the June 2016 changes to the API, you will need to invite the other users to be "Sandbox Users" of your API client. And even then, the access will be limited to their last 20 posts. Here's a quick explanation of the new Instagram API rules.
TL;DR
Sandbox users are other Instagram users that you “invite” to your
client. The main reason to do this is so that your app will then be
able to “see” their last twenty posts in addition to your own. In
other words, when they accept the invitation, they show up on the tiny
desert island where your app lives.
So you don't need their actual login credentials, but they do need to accept your invitation in order for it to work. The only other alternative is getting your app through the submission process to "go live" but there are very few use cases which they will accept anymore.
We have an app and have built in IG integration but keep getting denied on our submission. We want to allow our users who have IG accounts to sign in on our app and then link their IG account. We show the IG icon and their IG name with a follow button so a user can gain followers on IG through our app. We need the follower list permission so that we can know if they are already following them or not and the relationship permission so that we can follow from our app. We have detailed the use case demo'd on a video but this is the only reply we continue to get. Any assistance would be great.
follower_list:
This permission (follower_list) does not support the use case you described in your submission notes, screencast and website. Please review Login Permissions (http://instagram.com/developer/authorization/) for a comprehensive list of permissions and valid use cases.
relationships:
This permission (relationships) does not support the use case you described in your submission notes, screencast and website. Please review Login Permissions (http://instagram.com/developer/authorization/) for a comprehensive list of permissions and valid use cases.
I'm running into the same issue with them declining my application for a valid use case.
I think it's because there wasn't enough information for them to validate the app, or the website isn't following their Platform Policy. I would read through it and make sure you're doing everything they want you to do. I would triple check what use case you picked and how you justified that your app falls into it.
It's also good to cover these, taken from Instagram.com:
Your submission should explain what does your app or company do, which
of the approved use cases your integration falls into, who will be
using your app, how do your user authenticate with your app, how you
use the API to power your integration, how does your product use the
data acquired from Instagram, etc.
I'm trying to resolve an issue regarding Google+ and authorizing users for an app using Google OAuth-2. More specifically, I find the authorization is successful when the user presses Accept on the consent screen; using the oauth playground and the auth/games scope, that looks like: http://retrofist.com/temp/Auth_01.png
However, if I then check my app privileges at plus.google.com/apps, I see the playground listed as visible to 'Only You': http://retrofist.com/temp/Auth_02.png - even though 'Anyone on the web' was selected on the consent screen. As I'm using Google Play Games for leaderboards, the result is that no one can see any leaderboard entries until they have manually corrected this to 'Public' visibility.
Can anyone explain a reason or workaround for this? Many thanks.
I observed similar issues, my scores was not published publicly to the leaderboard of the game. I then realized that, this is only for users whose email is defined as tester email. I could see the scores as publicly posted after deleting those emails from tester list.
Facebook allows you to create test user accounts that can only be used for testing purpose.
Does Twitter provide similar functionality ? I don't want to get my application blacklisted for creating fake user accounts; do I have to use my real user account for testing my application ? What strategies are your using for testing application with Twitter ?
As far as I know, there is nothing in Twitter's rules against creating account (unlike Facebook, where with the exception of test accounts, you're not allowed to create multiple accounts for testing purposes). So, you can just register the account like you normally would.
You might want to take a look at this post for some other tips for test accounts (hiding your tweets, deleting the account when you're done testing, etc.).
I'm currently creating a Twitter application and here are some of the strategies I'm using.
I create my accounts in combination with Gmail addresses. If I create a gmail account as user bob#gmail.com , I secure the Twitter name #bob on Twitter. That way it's kind of hard to forget where to email a lost password. I don't go crazy, as I don't need 100's of test accounts but I do have up to three.
I log on to my test accounts using Chrome because it will automatically recall your password as soon as you type in your Twitter name on the home page. That way it is easy to switch between them, but note that I find it hard sometimes to know which account is actually active because I'm constantly looking at other profiles. This gets confusing if I don't constantly look at the logged in user icon indicator.
Never, ever re-tweet anything unless you absolutely have to for a test case or use hash-tags unless for a test case. Unbelievably even on a completely un-publicized account, I had a few surprise Twitter users in my DB a few seconds after I re-tweeted a link.
on Localhost, close all your other browser windows while your testing. Especially if your calling the API through AJAX. You never know which sites you have open whom also call the Twitter API through AJAX, and this can seriously screw with your tests and rate limits. Especially when your developing live.
I would not recommend protecting your tweets. It's too limiting for most use cases.
For my site, I need to place a link in the tweets. Twitter will not
allow live links to http://localhost so you have to plan around
this and have a live test server sooner then you may anticipate.
Twitter has one of the easiest registration processes I have seen. You can quite easily create several test accounts; this is the only method I have used.
Here is a blog post about it.