Nobody has ever implemented an OAuth flow for their application and then said, “That was fun. Let’s do it again.”

Don’t believe me? Just go to Twitter and search for “OAuth Sucks”. Or just search “OAuth”. Or best of all just follow the OAuthSucks Twitter account. It’s a sentiment that’s so common, it has it’s own Twitter account. How did I find this account? I tried to register it of course.

But why is OAuth so awful? And does it have to be this way? In this post, we’ll take a look. OAuth (2.0 specifically) has a litany of problems, starting with the fact that the 2.0 spec itself essentially allows anything to be considered “OAuth compliant”.