Do I have to re-authenticate when using firebase database persistence and firebase anonymous auth?

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I'm using firebase anonymous authentication and firebase realtime database with persistence. This question is about if I've to do anything to keep authentication valid.

I understand from firebase folks' helpful responses in stackoverflow that if we use standard auth providers, firebase ensures that the auth token don't expire. For example, this comment and this answer:

Anonymous authentication tokens do not expire and are persisted to disk between runs of your app

That said, can I conclude that even if database persistence is enabled, once the user is authenticated s/he remains authenticated until logged out (or authentication revoked specifically for this user) across app and device restarts?

I'm not sure since the documentation of Enabling offline capabilities of Realtime database mentions this

If your app uses Firebase Authentication, the Firebase Realtime Database client persists the user's authentication token across app restarts. If the auth token expires while your app is offline, the client pauses write operations until your app re-authenticates the user, otherwise the write operations might fail due to security rules.

This makes me wonder if I need to do anything to keep the authentication active across app and device restarts. I'm not interested in the token per se. I'm just interested in keeping the authentication valid until sign out.

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androidfirebasefirebase-realtime-databasefirebase-authentication

1 Answers

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That said, can I conclude that even if database persistence is enabled, once the user is authenticated s/he remains authenticated until logged out (or authentication revoked specifically for this user) across app and device restarts?

Database persistence has nothing to do with the Firebase anonymous authentication. According to the official documentation regarding Firebase Realtime Database persistence:

When you enable disk persistence, your app writes the data locally to the device so your app can maintain its state while offline, even if the user or operating system restarts the app.

And to answer the second question:

I understand from firebase folks' helpful responses in StackOverflow that if we use standard auth providers, firebase ensures that the auth token doesn't expire.

Yes, that correct. I answered a similar question. Please see the link below: