Anonymous user and account conversion to permanent account

Hi there

Is there a way in which AuthUI supports the conversion of a anonymous account to a permanent one (one of the supplied auth providers) As stated in the documentation and as I understand it, one must use the linkWithCredential method instead of the “normal” signInWith flow.

Can this be done with the current AuthUI version somehow?

[guillermomuntaner]

Facing similar case. My app uses default anonymous login to provide a frictionless experience while being able to store user data. Log-in (non anonymously) is a secondary optional feature if the user wants to save his data between devices or access specific features. So my app doesn’t really have a true logout status and instead rely on anon/non-anon statuses.

1 - Simple scenario; An anonymous user with some local data decides to sign up with X provider (new account). In this case FirebaseUI creates a new user instead of linking the new credentials to the current anonymous user. Moreover the new user is loged in without a warning, so the anon user is lost for ever. ¿Wouldn’t be a good default behaviour to try to link the credentials first? In case an account for those credentials already exists linkWithCredential will return an exception which can be handled as follow (see scenario 2)

2 - Complex scenario: An anonymous user tries to sign in (to an existing account). In this scenario we have 2 users and I guess it should be managed by the developer. So some sort of callback/result.

I see how this is problematic due to the potential complexity of second case, but at least the 1st case can be solved very easily by trying to link 1st new credentials when an anonymous user is in.

[iainmcgin]

Ah, we have a slight problem here after discussing this with some colleagues. There is deliberately no way to get back an AuthCredential from an existing user, to avoid potentially leaking credentials. So, the linking of the authentication method to the anonymous account would have to occur within Firebase UI if you are using the library. I’ll take a look at this next week to get you unblocked ASAP.