Hi everyone,
In summary: Google Drive is changing how some of its content is served and downloaded. If you are embedding Drive files in your apps via a drive.google.com/uc URL, you will need to update those URLs wherever they are stored by May 1st. We will also reach out directly to affected app owners and notify them that action will be required.
In detail: Historically, Google Drive offered a “download URL” that could be used to embed and serve images and other types of file content. As part of the gradual transition away from third-party cookie support, Google Drive has changed how it serves and downloads some of its content and will not offer download URLs anymore. AppSheet is benefiting from an exception until May 1st, 2024 and will be able to serve your Google Drive content via this download URL until that date.
Google Drive’s download URL starts with drive.google.com/uc and often looks like drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=file_ID.
AppSheet creators may be using it in their app definition settings and even in the data sources themselves.
You may already have noticed that Drive content embedded with that URL in websites or other apps is not displayed. Starting on May 1st, 2024, the same will be true on the AppSheet platform and AppSheet creators need to update how this content is accessed to ensure their end users are not impacted afterwards.
The AppSheet team is taking a number of steps to help AppSheet creators navigate this:
All of the above are to raise awareness about the change and to avoid disrupting customer operations on May 1st.
Additionally, AppSheet is setting a help page to guide AppSheet creators on updating their solutions and their data sources. Our plan is to update the page if we discover additional valuable information to help app creators. The supported methods for AppSheet solutions are available in our documentation on Display images and documents.
Let us know if you have any questions.
Thank you,
Arthur Rallu, for the AppSheet team
FAQ
If your app is loading content or has links that contain drive.google.com/uc as part of their URL, those will stop working after May 1st. Other drive.google.com URLs are unaffected - only the /uc endpoint is going away. More information is in our help page.
We are notifying app owners via email if we are able to detect those URLs being displayed in their application or defined in their app definition. However, we cannot guarantee that we will identify every affected app with 100% certainty - for example, if an external data source has affected Drive URLs in rows that are not being accessed by AppSheet, we would not be able to identify that.
No files are affected as part of this change - only the ability to access those files via drive.google.com/uc.
The files and their content remain unchanged. The issue is that AppSheet and web browsers will no longer be able to access them via Google Drive’s download URLs. App creators only need to change how to specify and give access to them.
The Google Drive team has published a blog post here that explains the rationale and technical reasons for this transition.
https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=xxxxxxxxxxxxx&export=view&authuser=0
i think this format is still working
Hello,
I have other webapps using Google Apps Script.
As of today, if it helps anyone landing here, this workaround is working for me:
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Hello. And is there any way to capture the file ID to include it in a formula dynamically?
That is, to obtain a link that starts with https where appsheet knows with which ID the file has been saved?