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I have a free mobile app (Android and iOS) used by mountain climbers, and the Sentinel imagery would be a huge safety benefit to see snow conditions in the high country. I have a few questions though:



  • I would have potentially thousands of users sharing a single API key. How would Sentinel keep one user from using up all of the monthly quota?




  • The enterprise costs are well out of range of what a free app can support. Are there alternatives? Is there a way to contact someone at Sentinel?




  • Is there a recommended way to keep the API key secret, to prevent third parties from stealing quota? I’m using the Android and iOS Google Maps SDK, so integrating OAuth could be quite difficult. Typically they expect a simple URL per tile.



Thanks!

—Andrew

Hi Andrew,

we recommend you use process API’s authentication, where you get a token key valid for 1 hour. You could even use our anonymous authentication option as we do it in Sentinel Playground, making it difficult for someone to steal your credentials but I am not sure this is really needed with mobile apps as the code there is not as open as with web applications. That being said, if you cannot integrate OAuth and you need simple URL per tile, it makes it difficult to do it safe.


Alternative is obviously to host a server-based proxy, which handles all of this, but it will slow down the performance for the user.


If your users are interested in similar locations, you can cache the data on your side, permanently, there is no limitation in this respect (e.g. Google only allows this for 1 month).


I suggest you try to get hold of ESA sponsored Sentinel Hub package, follow these instructions. It should not take you more than 15 minutes.

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