Change password with Firebase for Android

Question

I want to implement change password functionality for my application.

I included com.google.firebase:firebase-auth:9.0.2 in my build.gradle file and so far everything has been working fine until I tried to implement change password functionality.

I found that the FirebaseUser object has a updatePassword method that takes a new password as the parameter. I could use this method and implement validation myself. However, I need the user's current password for comparing with the inputted one and I can't find a way to get that password.

I also found another method on the Firebase object that takes the old password, new password, and a handler. The problem is that I need to also include com.firebase:firebase-client-android:2.5.2+ to access this class and when I am trying this method I'm getting to following error:

Projects created at console.firebase.google.com must use the new Firebase Authentication SDKs available from firebase.google.com/docs/auth/

Feel like I'm missing something here. What's the recommended approach for implementing this? And when to use what dependency?

Answer 1

I found a handy example of this in the Firebase docs:

Some security-sensitive actions—such as deleting an account, setting a primary email address, and changing a password—require that the user has recently signed in. If you perform one of these actions, and the user signed in too long ago, the action fails and throws FirebaseAuthRecentLoginRequiredException. When this happens, re-authenticate the user by getting new sign-in credentials from the user and passing the credentials to reauthenticate. For example:

FirebaseUser user = FirebaseAuth.getInstance().getCurrentUser();

// Get auth credentials from the user for re-authentication. The example below shows
// email and password credentials but there are multiple possible providers,
// such as GoogleAuthProvider or FacebookAuthProvider.
AuthCredential credential = EmailAuthProvider
        .getCredential("[email protected]", "password1234");

// Prompt the user to re-provide their sign-in credentials
user.reauthenticate(credential)
        .addOnCompleteListener(new OnCompleteListener<Void>() {
            @Override
            public void onComplete(@NonNull Task<Void> task) {
                if (task.isSuccessful()) {
                    user.updatePassword(newPass).addOnCompleteListener(new OnCompleteListener<Void>() {
                        @Override
                        public void onComplete(@NonNull Task<Void> task) {
                            if (task.isSuccessful()) {
                                Log.d(TAG, "Password updated");
                            } else {
                                Log.d(TAG, "Error password not updated")
                            }
                        }
                    });
                } else {
                    Log.d(TAG, "Error auth failed")
                }
            }
        });