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Octopus Developer Guide

Introduction: What is Octopus?​

Octopus is an SDK that lets you integrate a fully customizable social network directly into your app, fully aligned with your brand.

Octopus handles all the technical complexity for you—UI, back-end, and storage—along with operational features such as moderation, community engagement tools, and analytics. You can integrate everything seamlessly using our native Android and iOS SDKs.

With Octopus, you can create “Community” entry points anywhere in your app. These buttons open your Octopus Community Home page, and you have full control over their placement, design, and label.

The Octopus UI is entirely customizable—colors, typography, logo, and more—so it blends naturally with your app’s design, with no additional engineering effort required.

Octopus supports SSO (Single Sign-On), allowing your users’ profile information (name, photo, age, bio) to be automatically synced without requiring a separate login. You can choose whether users are allowed to edit profile details within Octopus or whether they are redirected to your own profile settings, giving you full control over identity management.

Inside Octopus, users can chat, post content (text, images, polls), react, comment, and browse a personalized feed—offering all the core features of modern social platforms. The experience is smooth, fast, and premium, aligned with the standards of leading social apps.

Example of integration in app ↗️

User Authentication​

If a user has an account in your application and is already logged in, they won’t need to authenticate again to access the community.

To implement this feature securely, you must add a new API route capable of generating an authentication JWT using a secret key (see Generate a signed JWT for SSO). This secret key must never be included in your mobile application code and should only be known by your servers.

Integration in 4 steps​

  1. Get an API key from us: identifies your community in our systems

  2. Get a secret signing key from us: needed to identify your users securely

  3. Integrate the SDK into your mobile application

    By default, two communities will be created for you, one sandbox community for your development and testing, and one production community for your real users. Any content created in one community will not be displayed in the other. You will get an API key for each community.

    SDK Setup Guide (SSO)

  4. Add a route inside your backend to sign user identification tokens

    To identify a user and prevent unauthorized use of your community and user impersonation, your backend must generate a signed token (using the JWT standard) with a secret signing key provided by Octopus. The JWT will include a unique user ID shared between your systems and Octopus:

    🔑 Generate a signed JWT for SSO

    The SDK’s connectUser() requires this JWT to sign in the user in the community, see SDK Setup Guide - Link your user