Seeking some thoughts here. When someone launches my mobile game for the first time, I would prefer they get into the gameplay first before having to worry about "signing up".
I think this provides for a better user experience as you can instantly jump into gameplay. Firebase supports anonymous accounts and saving progress against anonymous accounts, which can later be converted to an actual account (e.g linking their google or facebook accounts to their anonymous account) while retaining their game progress.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this approach or is it better to force a user to decide at app-launch to make a choice between creating an anonymous account or registering using google / facebook / email / etc?
Cheers
Kevin
This is actually a very similar use case to what it often pitched to web developers using Firebase:
For a shopping app, you'll often let a developer go through the shopping flow and finish checkout. When checkout is complete, you then "promote" their account to a full account so you don't bounce a customer out during the critical flow.
For a game, not only do I love this anonymous account flow (play now, then "upgrade" for any social features you need), but I think you can get a really cool natural flow going on. For example, if you were making tic tac toe, you could use a dynamic link to invite your friends to play against you. This link will usually persist across app installation (iOS and Android, although it's a little flakier on iOS) so the player you invite can jump right into the game you're playing using Anonymous Auth to seamlessly create an account.
There are two considerations you need to make though:
You're still storing user data if you pair Realtime Database with an anonymous account. I am not a lawyer, but if your region has strict privacy regulation you will want to talk to one.
The merging an anonymous account into a "full" account process does have some non-trivial edge cases. What do you do if the player already has a full account (obviously, you have to merge the data. But you'll have to do it by hand as there's no game-agnostic way for Firebase to do it for you)? What do you do if a different user claims the same email address when you promote your account (you'll need to throw one out, and there are rules for resolving which has the stronger claim to the name)?
2 is a little complicated also by the current architecture of the Firebase auth SDK as well. All of the C# objects are pointers to C++ objects under the hood. The "current user" was bound in a way that it references a global singleton on the C++ side representing user data. This has the unfortunate side effect that you can't cache a user data on the C# side in the case of a user entering their credentials incorrectly when "upgrading" an account (usually manifesting itself in having to re-enter a username/password and maybe losing cached data). This bug is actively being tracked (I believe it's a side-effect of this one), but in the near term it just means that you probably want a good way to either re-upload local data (assuming you'll lose access to the DB node once you drop the anonymous account) or you'll want to avoid persisting any user-specific data before migrating a player to a "full" account (probably a consideration I'd have with current privacy regulations anyway).
Related
I am confused on the insistence in the documentation to have users sign on to give authentication. With a card game app, I want users to get on easily (without a need to sign on), find a game to play in, and play the game. As cards are played, each turn is recorded in Firestore, and all users notified to read the changed parameters. So all users can read, write and update.
Even if I did make users sign on, anyone could create an account, and I would be no further ahead except I have turned away some game participants.
I know I can set rules so that all data is a small size. I maybe check to ensure no data is stored after a certain time without being used, and I could delete the collection for that game. Is is it this sort of procedures I use to guard the database from growing too big, or a 'bad' user working out where the data is, and overwriting data for some games.
If you want a low-friction way to get users signed in, use anonymous authentication. It will give the user an account with a UID without requiring any prompts. You can then use security rules to protect per-user information, since anonymous accounts have a UID just like normal accounts. You can then decide to let the user upgrade that account when they want a more permanent identity in your game (since anonymous accounts become inaccessible if the user clears their device local storage).
Is this a common/reasonable Use case?
An app allows a user to save favorites locally so that the user doesn't need to signup.
Then the user afterwards desires to share their favorites.
Therefore favorites data needs to be synced from local to remote. The usual local storage for flutter is sqflite, and firebase/store is the remote. However, this seems cumbersome, as sql to nosql conversion is necessary.
I thought that this would be a general issue for UX etc, but I can't find any discussion of this issue? Maybe forcing the user to create an account is the most general solution?
It's a common understanding that if you don't have user account then you can't have any user data associated with your name. You don't have to force the user to have an account or lock them out.
When they favourite something just show a dialog telling them "If you don't have an account your favourites are stored on the device only. If you want your favourites to be available everywhere please create an account" then show options for "Create account" or "No, Thanks"
Create account: Goes to account creation page
No, Thanks: Adds the device to the favourites list and lets the user continue to do what your app does.
There's no problem to solve here from what I'm seeing. If you don't have an account you don't get account functionality. If you track users without them entering anything it's also a little bit illegal and creepy so no need to push the limits on how you can track the same user.
Another way to think of it is to make signup so easy they don't mind and also guarantee that it's worth it. Won't be used for spam or information selling. Take what's app as an example, even though you need to mobile number to send the messages, it's just used as a unique identifier and has nothing to do with the device's number.
Ask for their phone number or email or just any email, you'll most likely get fake info.
And what does your analytics say? Are you getting requests from users saying they lost all their information on a different device? How many people are using your favourite functionality?
I may have come to the party a little late here but here's my 2 cents worth.
The Sql to NoSql conversion is not cumbersome. In fact, there is a reasonable use case for this. I have the same requirement for an app that I am about to build.
Anyway, to store data in RDMDB or NoSQLDB you will need a data model to ensure consistency in your app. If the user has been using the app offline, and they later choose to go online, you can allow them to create the Remote Account, then check if they have local favorites. If they do, you will HAVE to ask them if they'd like to import them into the remote storage. If they choose to do so, you will then have to read their favorites from the local storage and store them in a List<Model> then map() that back to the online storage.
NoSqlDB can accept the json type data, so your model should include the conversion fromMap() and toJson() for this purpose (and others).
When I have come around to doing this, I will share my code (if I remember to come back here).
Is there a way to protect the database from deletion? I mean it's very easy to click on the "x" next to the root node. This would destroy the whole app and cause an enourmous mess to deal with.
How to deal with this fragility?
EDIT:
Let's assume I have two firebase accounts: one for testing and one for the launched app. I regularly log in and out to use the other one. On the test account I delete whole nodes on a regular basis. An activated password protection would avoid a very expensive confusion of the two accounts.
If you give a user edit access to the Firebase Console of your project, the user is assumed to be an administrator of the database. This means they can perform any write operation to the database they want and are not tied to your security rules.
As a developer you probably often use this fact to make changes to your data structure while developing the app. For application administrators, you should probably create a custom administrative dashboard, where they can only perform the actions that your code allows.
There is no way to remove specific permissions, such as limiting the amount of data they can remove. It could be a useful feature request, so I suggest posting it here. But at the moment: if you don't trust users to be careful enough with your data, you should not give them access to the console.
As Travis said: setting up backups may be a good way to counter some of this anxiety.
I want to know what will happen to the users of my app that I used anonymous sign in method for them.
The Firebase documentation is really BAD and didn't explain everything and expect developer to find out himself.
I found in its old version documentation that anonymous session will expires based on the expiration time has been set in Login & Auth tab, but even there didn't mention this means just the session ends or it means that user id will remove also from my app users list or what EXACTLY happened?
I found this answer but it really is not acceptable. The number of anonymous users will grow very very fast if you do a web app and make every thing hard.
I even cannot see the number of my app users in my dashboard!!!!!
So, what should i do? should i develop a dashboard for my data myself or Firebase team should do it? At least for managing users i should have more power than just searching user with their email and when you use custom login you cannot do this also.
Anonymous users don't expire, and there isn't currently any automated way to purge them.
Firebase doesn't automatically remove them because it doesn't really know if a user is still storing data linked to that login - only the app creator does. Imagine if you are playing a puzzle game on your phone, and get to level 100. Then when you go to play level 101 next year, all progress is lost. Firebase can't just assume a user being inactive for a year means that the account can be removed.
There is a couple tools that should help, though.
1) Admin SDK & Firebase CLI list users.
2) Linking multiple auth providers
3) Auth State Persistence
Once you list your users, you can check that each doesn't have any other providers, and hasn't been used recently, doesn't have data stored, and delete them.
Better, though, would be to ensure that only one account is created per user. If you create an anonymous account to help users store data before logging in, you may want to consider prompting them to link a auth provider (like Google or email). If you link the account, rather than creating a new one, you'll avoid abandoned accounts from active users.
In general, you will also want to make sure to use auth state persistence to ensure that there aren't more accounts than necessary being created. Creating 1 account per new visitor, rather than 1 per time someone repeatedly visits your page, will significantly help keep user growth in check.
In my case, I am using the anonymous sign-in method for authentication without the knowledge of the user.
Each time when the user leaves the app, delete the anonymous user by -
FirebaseAuth.getinstance().currentuser?.delete()
There will be no stacking up of anonymous user with this and limits the number of anonymous user in the app
2023 update
Firebase has automatic clean up now.
If you've upgraded your project to Firebase
Authentication with Identity Platform, you can enable automatic
clean-up in the Firebase console. When you enable this feature you
allow, Firebase to automatically delete anonymous accounts older than
30 days. In projects with automatic clean-up enabled, anonymous
authentication will not count toward usage limits or billing quotas.
Any anonymous accounts created after enabling automatic clean-up might
be automatically deleted any time after 30 days post-creation.
Anonymous accounts created before enabling automatic clean-up will be
eligible for automatic deletion starting 30 days after enabling
automatic clean-up. If you turn automatic clean-up off, any anonymous
accounts scheduled to be deleted will remain scheduled to be deleted.
These accounts do not count toward usage limits or billing quotas. If
you "upgrade" an anonymous account by linking it to any sign-in
method, the account will not get automatically deleted. If you want to
see how many users will be affected before you enable this feature,
and you've upgraded your project to Firebase Authentication with
Identity Platform, you can filter by is_anon in Cloud Logging.
Docs
There is a possible cloud function for that.
Check: delete-unused-accounts-cron
This function deletes unused accounts after a certain time. Which might be also helpfull for nonanonymous users.
If you only want to delete anonymous users or check only for them (for example delete after a different inactive time than normal users) you can identify them by checking:
const inactiveUsers = result.users.filter(
user => {
isAnonymous = user.providerData.length == 0;
//do something when anonymous
});
If you'd like anonymous users to be removed from your user list, you'll have to write a service to do that for you.
Since firebase doesn't provide a way to list registered users, you'll have to make sure you're storing some sort of user list in the database. You can then use the node.js admin sdk to get user data, check if the user is anonymous, and find when the user was created. For performance reasons, you may wish to store this information in a special area of your database and retrieve it all at once. Once you've identified a stale anonymous user they can be easily deleted.
This question is not related to ASP.NET specifically, but more web applications in general.
I am building a web application wherein I am registering a user. As of now I am taking in very basic credentials like First Name, Last Name, etc of the user. In this website I am giving some information for free for any user who has just registered so that the user finds my website authentic and that it is not a fake website. After that, to get more information, the user has to pay.
The information my site provides will get obsolete after sometime. So, when a new user registers, he/she will get the new information that gets updated; but the old users have to pay to get the same new information.
My problem here is once the information gets obsolete the same person can re-register with a different set of credentials and get the new information. I want to avoid this from happening.
So my question here is this: what information should I request from the user, or extract from the user, to check that the same user is not re-registering? Or any other way to make this possible.
I am thinking of getting the IP address of the machine from which the person is registering and use it to check. But the user can use a different machine to re-register.
I am completely lost here and not getting the solution. I even checked on the Internet but could not find an answer.
Please let me know if you need any further information from my side.
You will not find a technical way to prevent users from registering multiple times. They can simply use another device, IP, another email account and different credentials.
What you can do is asking them to send you hard to fake "offline" information, like a credit card number or a photo of the ID. Some users may still be able to register multiple times this way, but probably not indefinitly. You will however lose many possible clients this way who are unwilling to provide such information for a test account, so this is likely not the solution you want.
My advice would be one of the following two:
Limit the information/service you give out to free users, so that even if they register again they will gain something when they pay.
Try to bind them to their account in a way where they would lose something if they threw it away. This may for example be providing user rewards for activity (real or virtual) or increasing their experience based on their history. Take SO for example: If you registered again, you would lose all your reputation. The users will think twice if this is worth the new content.
After reading all of the above, i think a good solution could be to let the user identify himself through facebook or linkedin. Few people will have a second account.
I think you cannot put any users like that because every thing can be duplicate
There are some ways for which the user must have payment mode or identity details like passport or it is windows application you can have finger scanner it will be definitely Unique..
You can do this (with limitations) with the use of cookies. Setting a cookie on the users device will allow you to determine who the visitor is and that they have already registered.
The limitations are that cookies can be deleted or blocked and are only valid for that specific user agent - the user could use a different device or a different browser on the same device. A lot of people don't really know about cookies though and how to delete them.
By tying this technique with a requirement to provide a valid email address you can make it a hassle for somebody to register more than once as they will have to create a new email account and then delete their cookies.
Whether this will stop enough people depends on your site and your requirements - if you're giving money away then this technique is not nearly good enough. If you just want to discourage the practice of multiple accounts it may be enough.
Your only way out is to have SOMETHING the existing user gets as a "gift?" or added value to maintain just one account. If you can identify items of value to your subscribers and offer to "give" it to them provided their account "attains" one or more status, then you'll get some control. Take stackoverflow.com for example, I don't need a second account.
Identifying by facebook or linkedin is a good option, but if you are giving such services. which are very beneficial for the users, so they dont mind on creating multiple accounts on even facebook or linked in.
So what i think is to set some reward type stuff with each user, and increase the services as they get increment in rewards.once they are good in rewards and are capable to use multiple services, this increases the probability that they will not create another account.