Firebase auth by client version

30 views
Skip to first unread message

Alex Ferrier

unread,
Nov 19, 2017, 10:10:23 PM11/19/17
to Firebase Google Group
[I thought I posted about this last week, but a search shows it never got posted, so maybe I hit discard.]

Last week we publicly released a dumb mistake in our app which resulted in many users making enormous RTDB queries, and if we were out of soft-launch would have generated large costs on our database. 

We pushed an update to production, and update adoption has been good, which stopped the issue as there are only a small number of old clients connecting. 

In case this happens again, is there a way we can auth via the client version (or some othe mechanism) so we can instantly say "stop clients reading from to the DB unless [some post-release condition, e.g. app version > xxx is true]".

Obviously we can include a killSwitch in our own app, via an explicit "/minSupportedClientVersion" key in our DB that we check on launch, then flow users through a play/app store upgrade instead of allowing them to go forward. 

Samuel Stern

unread,
Nov 20, 2017, 11:15:03 AM11/20/17
to fireba...@googlegroups.com
Hi Alex,

This is a great fit for Remote Config.  You can use conditions such as the app version to set the configuration values received on the device.  I use Remote Config to implement a customizable kill switch in almost every app I develop, and I think you'll find it's useful for much more than that.

If you're curious, this blog post talks about how we used Remote Config to implement advanced feature flags in the Santa Tracker Android app.

- Sam

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Firebase Google Group" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to firebase-tal...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fireba...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/firebase-talk/728c455f-6c46-4e00-b95e-ef6e70dc7829%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages