Introduction
Ever since Firebase was introduced, I thought it would have a significant effect on mobile development. The makers of Firebase have made that evident with authentication, real-time databases, machine learning, analytics, and so on.
In this article, we’re going to learn how to use the FirebaseAuth library to authenticate users using phone number authentication via OTP with the resend feature.
Let’s get started.
Why Phone Number Authentication?
There are a few benefits to using phone number-based authentication:
- Avoid duplicate accounts:When you create an account based on a unique phone number, it’ll be hard to create multiple accounts.
- Security: With phone number verification, users won’t have any passwords, so every time they log in, it can be done with a dynamic verification code sent directly to their mobile.
- User experience: Phone number verification reduces the friction for the users to log in, as they don’t have to remember any password.
Why Firebase?
Implementing phone number authentication involves sending an SMS to a user’s mobile. To do so, we need to pay for SMS services. But via Firebase, we can send an SMS without any cost. Firebase offers 10,000 verifications per month under the free plan.
Apart from that, Firebase has been helpful to developers in several use cases, such as implementing a real-time database, authenticating users via social media platforms and phone numbers, monitoring analytics, sending notifications, and more.
A front-end developer can do all of this without any knowledge of server-side code. This is one of the core advantages of using Firebase. We can also implement Firebase on Android, IOS, and web seamlessly.
#programming #firebase #authentication #android #software-development
