Cobalt has over 100+ applications to integrate with, seamlessly. Cobalt lets your customers provide you with authorization to access their application platform. They do this by authenticating the application by providing the credentials such as an API key, a token or any other client credentials as required by the application platform, Or by OAuth mechanism.

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OAuth mechanism

Imagine borrowing a friend’s book from their bookshelf. You wouldn’t ask them to hand over the entire bookshelf and all their belongings, right? Instead, you’d simply ask for the specific book you need. OAuth works similarly, allowing secure access to specific resources on one platform without needing the user’s full credentials.

Here’s how it works:

• You want to access a resource on another platform.
• You ask the user for permission to access that specific resource.
• The user logs in to the platform and grants you permission.
• The platform provides you with an access token, a temporary key, instead of your user’s entire login credentials.
• You use the access token to access the specific resource without needing the full login details.

Benefits of OAuth:

• Increased security: No sharing of sensitive user credentials like passwords.
• Improved user experience: Seamless and secure authorization without requiring users to enter their credentials on multiple platforms.
• Wider reach: Enables developers to build apps that integrate with various platforms and services.

Creating a developer app for OAuth is crucial because:

• It defines the scope of access your app needs: You specify which resources on the other platform your app wants to access e.g., read emails, manage contacts, etc.
• It establishes your app’s identity: The platform recognizes your app and grants access tokens accordingly.
• It enables secure communication: You receive secure credentials - access tokens to interact with the platform’s resources.

Cobalt handles the API calls and Token management of all your application integrations. However, to create those tokens it is required that you create a developer app as it would provide the required client credentials to create the token.

Here, we have brought together the developer app setup documentations of all the apps supported by Cobalt, with the primary focus on apps with OAuth setup.