User sign in challenge

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1

Hi everyone,

I’m facing a big challenge here.
I’m building an app for a service in an african countries where email usage is not the norm.
So the usual “welcome screen” where users need to log in with their mail and receive a Pin number is quite a blocker for me.

I’ve checked in previous post and it seems like it’s not possible to remove the PIN request, is it still the case?

Thinking about alternative solution:

  • Is it possible to use Phone number for sign in (and send the pin via sms) ?

Thanks a lot for your help on this one

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2

You can use “sign in with google” as alternative to pin. The option is available in App Settings

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3

I don’t think it will be a possible solution as that assume users have a gmail email address

4

Hi Deborah,

If I understand you correctly, you have built an application where you would like users to sign in (because we can assume that the app is personalized to each user) and you would like each user to be able to sign in with a cell phone number rather than email address (because presumably, the target audience of your application doesn’t use email much and do use cell phones).

You’re stuck. Natively in Glide, the only way a user can sign in and be identified as a user is via an email address. This email address can be submitted by the user manually, or the user can sign in with Google as Optimus_Prime suggested, but at the end of the day, sign-in is done via email.

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5

@nathanaelb Ok I see …
And Is it possible to remove the request for the PIN ?

6

No, you can’t just remove the pin portion of the sign in process. You can’t securely allow someone to sign in without some kind of verification of who they are. Even if glide would allow you to “sign in” without a pin, that would mean that anybody could type in any other user and impersonate them. It’s not secure.

You can remove the sign in process and make your app public, but as @nathanaelb mentioned, you lose all ability to personalize the app experience based on a signed in user, or protect any of that user’s sensitive data.

Many cell phone providers have an email version of the phone number that can be used for SMS messages. That way a user could use their phone number (55555555555@cellcompany.com) to sign in and receive the pin in an SMS message. It would be worth checking if your user’s cell provider has that option.

Another alternative is to have your users sign up for a free email address, using one of many options out there.

Glide is heavily reliant on emails, and I don’t foresee that changing. In the future they may allow passwords instead of pins, but I think email would still be required.

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