Firebase auth, vs my own pros/cons of having my users in firebase

[d...@hotsauceapp.co]

I will mostly auth by passwordless mobile. Option email/password or facebook later on.

I can create my own no problem with jwt tokens on my backend. Taking care of the sms and managing users is a little more dev work, but evens out having total control and the auth would be slightly faster being on a closer/same server.

Some pros I see are with android the phone verification avoids a click or 2.

We already use the analytics and would like to use more features of the Grow, like Admob or Preditions... Would it help that our users with be in the firebase system for auth vs using our own auth for analytics/grow, currently we just send the id....or are those features more independent if we use auth or not.

[Samuel Stern]

Hi Dan,

As you said, most of the Grow products will work just as well with your own auth system as with Firebase Auth.  Here are the high-level benefits of Firebase Auth, from my perspective:

• Time/Money/Security/Stability - these are all benefits of choosing to use auth as a service rather than building it yourself.  Firebase Auth has already done a lot of the hard work for you in building out secure user storage, email/phone verification flows, etc.
• Develop Product Integration - Firebase Auth has very powerful integrations with the Develop products like Cloud Firestore, Realtime Database, and Cloud Storage. These products are all secured with declarative security rules, which require Firebase Authentication to add granular per-user security.

As you said, the big con is losing control.  However you can regain most of the control by using the Firebase Admin SDKs to do either custom authentication or to add custom claims to your Firebase Auth users.

Hope that helps,

Sam

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[d...@hotsauceapp.co]

Thanks for the reply, the auth can integrate fine into my own C# api as well, that's no problem. For analytics on the users on auth, are there tools for that? Basically to show reports for new users...

[Samuel Stern]

Hi Dan,

We don't provide many tools to analyze the users in Firebase Auth, which is intentional.  Most Firebase developers put information on their users into one of the database products (Realtime Database or Cloud Firestore) or Analytics for analysis.

We do provide a Cloud Functions trigger that can fire each time a new user signs up:

https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/extend-with-functions

So it should be trivial to create your own new user reports with this mechanism, you could even set up the function to report into an external/proprietary system so you don't need to learn new analysis tools.

- Sam

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/firebase-talk/39e65529-6982-4f0c-902d-b5cb1dada770%40googlegroups.com.