Firebase Login and Authentication: Android Tutorial

 

Sumit Mishra

15th October 2019

Firebase Login and Authentication: Android Tutorial



Take out your Android Phones and try to count the number of applications that are not having any kind of login or authentication in it. So, you got it, right? There are very few applications that are not having any kind of login or authentication in it. In fact, when we start learning Android development, then most of us must have built the basic login and signup screen. So, are we going to build some login and signup screen here? No, but yes also ;) Don't worry, in this blog, we will be learning how to login and authenticate in our Android application but with the help of Firebase . Following is how the flow of this blog looks like:

Introduction to Firebase

Login and Authentication in Firebase

Example - Email login and registration

Pros and cons of using Firebase

Closing notes

So, let's get started.

Introduction to Firebase

Firebase was developed in 2011 to create and provide support for mobile and web applications. Later on, in 2014, it was acquired by Google. It gives you a number of facilities that can be used for the fast development of your applications. So, all you need to do is build applications fastly without thinking of managing infrastructure. Following are the products of Firebase that can be used in any applications:

Cloud Firestore: It is a NoSQL database that is used to easily store, sync, and query data for applications.

ML Kit: It gives the power of Machine Learning to your applications.

Authentication: It is used to authenticate the users of your applications.

Realtime Database: It is used to store and retrieve data in realtime.

Crashlytics: It provides you with the crash reports of your application.

Test Labs: It will test your applications on the devices hosted by Google.

Performance Monitoring: Monitors the performance of your application at each and every second.

In-App Messaging: It helps you to send in-app messages that helps your users to interact with you.

Google Analytics: It will generate a report of your application. For example, a report of users increased in the last one month or active users, etc.

Remote Config: It helps you to change or add some feature in your app even without putting any update.

Apart from the above-mentioned products of Firebase, some of the other Firebase products are Cloud Functions , Hosting , Cloud Storage , App Distribution , Predictions , A/B Testing , Cloud Messaging and Dynamic Links .

In this blog, we will learn about the authentication part of the Firebase.

Login and Authentication in Firebase

Firebase authentication is used to authenticate the users of applications in a very easy manner. Not only for the users but for the developers also, it provides a very easy flow for the authentication and login process that is present in almost every application.

Firebase supports authentication using email and password, phone numbers or even you can use facebook, google, twitter, github, etc.

To authenticate your users, all you need to do is get the authentication credentials from the user and then pass this credential to the Firebase Authentication SDK. These credentials can be email-password or mobile number or any token from identity providers like facebook, google, twitter, github, etc. After passing the credentials, Firebase will verify the credentials and in return, you will get a response that tells you if the authentication is successful or not.

Note: By default, the authenticated users can read/write the data from the realtime database or cloud storage.

Now, let's see how we can use Firebase login or authentication in our application.

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