Instagram access token expire

Question

I have an app, that pulls data from my Instagram account. I authorized this app once, and got access token. But I'm worried, what if this token expires? Should I authorized the app each time the token expires? Can I receive another access token from the auth code? If no, what can I do to have my app always pulling data from account without my participation? Thanks.

Answer 1

But I'm worried, what if this token expires?

AFAIK, Instagram accesstokens don't expire currently.

Note: From Instagram documents.

Note that we do not include an expiry time. Our access_tokens have no explicit expiry, though your app should handle the case that either the user revokes access or we expire the token after some period of time. In this case, your response’s meta will contain an “error_type=OAuthAccessTokenError”. In other words: do do not assume your access_token is valid forever.

Should I authorize the app each time the token expires?

At the moment, you do not need to do that, as token does not expire. As and when the token expires in future, a corresponding warning or error code and message will be sent to you, which you need to handle.

what can I do to have my app always pulling data from account without my participation?

You can try following:

1. Use sharedpreference to store the accesstoken.

2. First time when you try to fetch data that needs accesstoken(Authenticated requests), first check in the sharedpreference whether the accesstoken is stored or not. if yes then you don't need to login, just use that accesstoken. If you don't have the accesstoken in preference then do the login using instagram credentials, get the accesstoken and then share it in shared preference and use that for subsequent requests.

3. You can provide instagram logout option in which you just need to clear the accesstoken from sharedprefernce.

Hope this is helpful to you.

Answer 2

Update - This no longer works as mentioned in the comments

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While not well documented, It's worth pointing out that retrieving a feed of posts does not require an accessToken.

https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/{user-id}/media/recent/?access_token=ACCESS-TOKEN 

can also be called passing just your client_id

https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/{user-id}/media/recent/?client_id=CLIENT_ID 

This isn't made clear in their documentation though.

https://instagram.com/developer/endpoints/users/