Integration with Firebase for Authentication in React Native

Integration with Firebase for Authentication in React Native

Firebase is a Google Backendasa Service (BaaS) that offers many benefits to React Native developers. With Firebase and React Native, you can quickly build mobile applications at a low cost without worrying about back-end solutions. Firebase offers many great products, including:

  • Real-time Database
  • Authentication
  • Cloud Firestore
  • Cloud Functions

Firebase Authentication provides a back-end service and an easy-to-use SDK for authenticating users to your app. It supports passwords, phone numbers, and authentication by popular federation identity providers like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Usage

Listen to authentication status. In most authentication scenarios, you want to know if the user is currently signed in or out of the application. This module provides a method called onAuthStateChanged, and this allows you to subscribe to the user's current authentication state and receive events when that state changes. Note that the onAuthStateChanged listener is asynchronous and triggers an initial state when a connection to Firebase is established. Therefore, it is essential to set an "initialized" state that blocks the main application from being rendered while the connection is established.

Persistent authentication state

For web-based applications, the Firebase Web SDK leverages features such as cookies and local storage to keep users authenticated between sessions. The native Firebase SDK also provides this functionality using the SDK on the device, ensuring that the user's previous authentication state is preserved between app sessions.

Users can clear the status by clearing the app data/cache from the device settings. Anonymous login Some applications don't require authentication, so it's challenging to identify what a user is doing with the app. When connecting to an external API, it's also helpful to make sure the user request is coming from your app and add a layer of security.

This can be achieved using the signInAnonymously method. This method creates a new anonymous user to be persisted and provides a user ID so that it can be integrated with other services such as analytics. Ensure the "anonymous" login provider is enabled in the Firebase console.