Applications can be classified as either first-party or third-party, which refers to the ownership of the application. The main difference relates to who has administrative access to your Auth0 domain.

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First-party applications

First-party applications are those controlled by the same organization or person who owns the Auth0 domain. For example, let’s say you created both a Contoso API and an application that logs into contoso.com and consumes the Contoso API. You would register both the API and application under the same Auth0 domain, and the application would be a first-party application. By default, all applications created via the Auth0 Dashboard are first-party applications.

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Third-party applications

Third-party applications are controlled by someone who most likely should not have administrative access to your Auth0 domain. Third-party applications enable external parties or partners to securely access protected resources behind your API. An example of this is with Facebook, let’s say you created an application to get a and secret to integrate with your service. That application is considered third-party because it is not owned by Facebook but a third-party that wants to integrate with Facebook APIs and services. All applications created through Dynamic Client Registration will be third-party. Third-party applications cannot be created using the Dashboard, but must be created through the Auth0 by setting is_first_party to false. Third-party applications have the following unique characteristics:
  • User Consent: You must require user consent when consuming APIs because anyone can create an application. Requiring the user to provide consent improves security.
  • : ID tokens generated for third-party applications hold only minimum user profile information.
  • Connections: You can only use tenant-level connections or domain connections. For more information, see Enable Third-party Applications.

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