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  • How to use FirebaseUI for Android

    Firebase is an app development platform by Google, offering various services for Android, iOS and the web. The services themselves are supported by a set of open-source libraries like FirebaseUI Android. According to the Firebase Open Source website,

    FirebaseUI is an open-source library for Android that allows you to quickly connect common UI elements to Firebase APIs.

    At the time of writing this in January 2025, the latest release of this library (v8.0.2) was published in September 2022, more than 2.5 years ago. The main branch of the GitHub repository has not seen a single commit since then – and while other branches at first glance suggest that a potential v8.1.0 or even v9.x is being worked on, none of these branches have seen any meaningful changes after their respective initial commits.

    For all intents and purposes, the FirebaseUI library version that can be used today is the version that was published while Android 13 was still new and the latest Firebase BoM was v30.5.0 (compare to the most recent BoM here) – and it shows:

    • FirebaseUI depends on SafetyNet, which was announced to be deprecated in 2022, with full turndown at the end of January 2025 after an extended timeline (issue)
    • FirebaseUI does not work with Android SDK 34 released in 2023 (issue)
    • FirebaseUI can’t be compiled using a dependency on Play Services Auth >= 21.1.0 since early 2024 (issue)
    • FirebaseUI comes with its own Play Services dependencies, although those are no longer required by Firebase (issue)
    • FirebaseUI uses the deprecated Google Sign-In that will be removed in 2025 instead of Credential Manager (issue)

    Adding insult to injury, the official Firebase Auth documentation suggests to add dependencies for the even older v7.2.0 released in June 2021.

    tl;dr

    Do not use FirebaseUI for Android, because its codebase is rotten.

  • Hello, World!

    This is the beginning – or, if you’re reading in reverse chronological order, the end. All beginnings (and endings) are hard, so without further ado: I’m Andreas and I’ve been fascinated by computers and related technology for as far as I can think back.

    Photo of an Amiga 500 Plus home computer, showing the "AMIGA" and "Commodore A-500 Plus" logos in the upper right corner, and parts of the keyboard below it.
    Detail of an AMIGA 500 Plus, the first home computer I owned.

    This might become a place where I put longer texts about technology, computing, coding and related, both new and old – or it might stay just another mostly empty web page. We’ll see… 😉