Empty providerData for Auth Users on iOS after upgrade

[appsgenie]

I recently upgraded the version of @react-native-firebase/auth from ^19.2.2 to ^21.6.1, and I started experiencing a strange issue only on iOS. All existing logged-in users on iOS are returning an empty array for the providerData field when using the onAuthStateChanged listener. However, when users log out and log back in, or when a new user signs up, the issue does not occur, and the providerData array contains the expected data (such as information about which login provider was used).

Since this issue is happening in production and only with logged-in users, I am unable to exactly replicate or gather all the information needed to create a comprehensive bug report at this point. I am not sure where to start troubleshooting or what additional debug logs to add, and I would really appreciate any help to get started in diagnosing the root cause.

Has anyone else encountered this issue after upgrade?

[mikehardy]

smells like firebase-ios-sdk underlying issue if it is iOS only, and on some methods but not others
If it were all methods it could be the API restrictions on account enumeration, but that doesn't seem like a fit to me if it is only on some methods
If it were ios and android that would also hint at account enumeration, or an incompatibility

Unfortunately you are crossing a couple major version boundaries so I'm not sure how many times you'd have to bisect to check all the different firebase-ios-sdk releases. That's the other avenue to pursue - upgrade step-wise (or bisect) checking only the react-native-firebase versions where I mention in the CHANGELOG that I've adopted a new firebase-ios-sdk

We release fairly often here so each version is usually pretty small at least, and we issue semver majors for even tiny breaks so those are usually pretty small too. Ideally checking where the break happened and zeroing in on the diff isn't too hard

Not having a full reproduction is tough though

[appsgenie]

yea definitely not easy to repro but I think I found a couple similar issues reported under firebase-ios-sdk so for now I assume it's related to this library and not the react native wrapper. example: firebase/firebase-ios-sdk#9682

once the screen is locked or "asleep", the app closes I assume in background and I do not have any special timers to keep the RTDB alive. This is because I am using the presence example with ".info/connected". Same as in rn-firebase docs. What happens is once the app is back in foreground, this connection does not resume and doing a set() just hangs. For now my fix is to call goOffline() then goOnline() each time the app goes from background -> active. But I am afraid that could be too excessive.

[mikehardy]

Good find on upstream issue 9682 - I'd seen that before but forgotten so this didn't jog my memory. Glad you have a workaround for it - that's definitely not going to be something we can resolve here. I commented there though

Are you resolved on your empty providerData thing? If so, marking it as answered might help it appear correct for anyone in the future that sees this in case they don't have firebase-ios-sdk 11.7.0 and hit the providerData issue

[appsgenie]

Sorry for delay, I was waiting for more production logs from real iOS devices regarding empty providerData after the upgrade and unfortunately still seeing it missing :( maybe that firebase-ios-sdk fix in that specific version was not part of the latest "@react-native-firebase/...": "^21.7.1" that I upgraded to?

[mikehardy]

🤔 All the commits have release refs against them in github indicating it shipped
firebase/firebase-ios-sdk@424c02b --> 11.7.0 release of firebase-ios-sdk
9da251d --> 11.7.0 first adopted in react-native-firebase 21.7.0

Also you can examine your Podfile.lock to make sure Auth is 11.7.0 as a cross check.

Unfortunate this did not fix the issue for you, not sure what to do beyond that - what's the percent incidence among your userbase? How prevalent is this? Is there anything you notice that is distinct about affected population of users?

[appsgenie]

My user base is mostly Android, thus the percent of users is low and affects only those users who were logged in already before last release. Meaning, user was auth'ed inside the app when they upgraded. And now the same behavior still, with the latest upgrade that was hoping to fix this, they stayed logged in still and showing empty providerData. I tried to ask a couple users to log out and re-login so will see if there is anyone willing to do that. I see multiple users on the same iOS devices at times that are not running into this issue, so it tells me a new token or a new firebase auth instance is working fine. For now, not seeing any other pattern (like around iOS version of device model or year).
Sorry not sure if this is enough info but about all I have from observing logs. Could add more logs if need be in a future release.