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Comment by rajbala | Hacker News Reader

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but it's not always practical and perhaps not even possible.

For example the push notifications SDK from Urban Airship and app analytics SDK from Flurry depend on having credentials stored in the app.

These examples are not unique to them. I don't disagree that it's wrong, but I don't know how to work around this to be candid.

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Those are examples of AWS-like facilities. The embedded keys are not secret credentials that allow people to control your account! If you are embedding your account credentials from Urban Airship or Flurry in your app, you are badly misusing their APIs. They provide facilities for generating certificates/keys for each application.

Urban Airship actually instructs you to create a plist file for an iOS app where you specify your production app keys.

http://docs.urbanairship.com/build/ios.html

The point is that these keys do not let you control the account: they only let you inject potentially-fake data; if these keys also let you register new applications, delete data, download data, or send information to third-parties, then that would be a serious problem. (In the case of Urban Airship, as opposed to Flurry, I don't know as much about the specific use case, but it would surprise me if the scenario were drastically different.

I'm not embedding account credentials for Flurry and UA in my app. I embedding app keys and while those don't allow someone to take over my account they could certainly wreak havoc with push notifications.

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