D. Authentication

Firebase Authentication

Most apps need to know the identity of a user. Knowing a user's identity allows an app to securely save user data in the cloud and provide the same personalized experience across all of the user's devices.

Firebase Authentication provides backend services and easy-to-use SDKs. It supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, popular federated identity providers like Google, Facebook and Twitter, and more.

Firebase Authentication integrates tightly with other Firebase services, and it leverages industry standards like OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, so it can be easily integrated with your custom backend.

Key capabilities

You can sign in users to your Firebase app by using the Firebase Authentication SDK to manually integrate one or several sign-in methods into your app.

Function	Description
Email and password based authentication	Authenticate users with their email addresses and passwords. The Firebase Authentication SDK provides methods to create and manage users that use their email addresses and passwords to sign in. Firebase Authentication also handles sending password reset emails.
Federated identity provider integration	Authenticate users by integrating with federated identity providers. The Firebase Authentication SDK provides methods that allow users to sign in with their Google, Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub accounts.
Phone number authentication	Authenticate users by sending SMS messages to their phones.
Custom auth system integration	Connect your app's existing sign-in system to the Firebase Authentication SDK and gain access to Firebase Realtime Database and other Firebase services.
Anonymous auth	Use Firebase features that require authentication without requiring users to sign in first by creating temporary anonymous accounts. If the user later chooses to sign up, you can upgrade the anonymous account to a regular account, so the user can continue where they left off.

How does it work?

To sign a user into your app, you first get authentication credentials from the user. These credentials can be the user's email address and password, or an OAuth token from a federated identity provider. Then, you pass these credentials to the Firebase Authentication SDK. Our backend services will then verify those credentials and return a response to the client.

After a successful sign in, you can access the user's basic profile information, and you can control the user's access to data stored in other Firebase products. You can also use the provided authentication token to verify the identity of users in your own backend services.

Note: By default, authenticated users can read and write data to the Firebase Realtime Database and Cloud Storage. You can control the access of those users by modifying your Firebase Database Rules and Storage Security Rules

Implementation path

Step	Description
Set up sign-in methods	For email address and password or phone number sign-in and any federated identity providers you want to support, enable them in the Firebase console and complete any configuration required by the identity provider, such as setting your OAuth redirect URL.
Implement UI flows for your sign-in methods	For email address and password sign-in, implement a flow that prompts users to type their email addresses and passwords. For phone number sign-in, create a flow that prompts users for their phone number, and then for the code from the SMS message they receive. For federated sign-in, implement the flow required by each provider.
Pass the user's credentials to the Firebase Authentication SDK	Pass the user's email address and password or the OAuth token that was acquired from the federated identity provider to the Firebase Authentication SDK.

Get started with Firebase Authentication in AdobeAIR

• Add Authentication
• Init Authentication
• Manage Users
• Phone Number
• Custom Authentication
• Anonymous Authentication
• Passing State in Email Actions
• Email Link Authentication

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DISCRIMINATION: Firebase SDKs are developed by Google and they own every copyright to the Firebase "native" projects. However, we have used their "compiled" native SDKs to develop the ActionScript API to be used in AdobeAIR mobile projects. Moreover, as far as the documentations, we have copied and when needed has modified the Google documents so it will fit the needs of AdobeAIR community. If you wish to see the original documentations in Android/iOS, visit here. But if you are interested to do things in AdobeAIR, then you are in the right place.