Firebase-js-sdk: `auth/network-request-failed` being thrown on Cordova app when sign in

[deoxen0n2]

Describe your environment

• Operating System version: Android 7.1.1, iOS 10.3.2
• Firebase SDK version: 3.9.0
• Firebase Product: auth

Describe the problem

Cannot reliably sign in using Firebase email and password on cordova app (Android and iOS). When signing in auth/network-request-failed is thrown.

Steps to reproduce:

I can reproduce this 100% of the time on my Nexus 5x phone (also tested on Firefox and Chrome desktop, but never encounter this problem). cordova-plugin-whitelist is configured and has been worked in the past. I experimented a lot, the steps to reproduce is like this:

From Android phone:

1. Use login form with email, password, and login button
2. Enter email and password
3. While device keyboard is still opened, press enter (big right arrow on some keyboards) or the login button and auth/network-request-failed will be thrown
4. Tap somewhere else to close the keyboard, press the login button and auth/network-request-failed will be thrown again
5. Tap into email or password input, press enter (big right arrow on some keyboards) or the login button and now it will log in successfully

It should has nothing to do with the keyboard or input focus / refocus but I don't have any clue either.

Related issue: https://github.com/angular/angularfire2/issues/581

Downgrading to Firebase SDK 3.3 does solve this issue as mentioned in the above thread.

Relevant Code:

firebase.auth().createUserWithEmailAndPassword(email, password).catch(function(error) {
  console.log(error.code);   // `auth/network-request-failed`
});

[google-oss-bot]

Hey there! I couldn't figure out what this issue is about, so I've labeled it for a human to triage. Hang tight.

[google-oss-bot]

Hmmm this issue does not seem to follow the issue template. Make sure you provide all the required information.

[bojeil-google]

Can you please provide the actual code to recreate this? It will make it easier to debug. The code you added does not show the listeners you have set up to process/submit the create user form.

[deoxen0n2]

@bojeil-google Sorry I will try to setup the minimal repo to reproduce this since my actual code is rather complicated. It might take some time because I'm kind of busy right now.

[grrrian]

I am also having this issue. It only appears on Android (tested on multiple devices with multiple OS). I am also using Cordova with Firebase 3.9.0. In my case it's calling firebase.auth().signInWithCustomToken(digitsToken) that returns auth/network-request-failed. It only happens about 10% of the time.

If this help, here is a related issue thread where they also recommend downgrading to 3.3.0: https://github.com/angular/angularfire2/issues/581

[jshcrowthe]

@grrrian / @deoxen0n2 if we can get code that demonstrates the issue, we'd be happy to dig into this a little further!

[pvdyck]

I tried but it's kinda sporadic ... any flag we can set to provide a clearer log ?

[bojeil-google]

It is likely to be network related especially if you are using cellphone networks. Most of these reports tend to be for mobile apps (Ionic/Cordova, etc). The timeout on mobile devices is 1 minute. We also check nagivator.onLine before trying.
If you can get network logs, it would be very helpful. I just can't recreate these unless I am connecting to a bad network which is expected.

[pvdyck]

It is indeed happening on mobile apps and, to my knowledge, never happened on a "standard" browser. Still, shouldn't we simply retry (silently?) when we receive "auth/network-request-failed" back ?

[bojeil-google]

We don't want to enforce that for everyone. It should be easy for you to do it on your end:

firebase.auth().signInWithCustomToken(digitsToken).catch(function(error) {
  if (error.code === 'auth/network-request-failed') {
    // Try again.
    return firebase.auth().signInWithCustomToken(digitsToken);
  }
  // Rethrow all other errors.
  throw error;
}).then(function(user) {
  /// Success either on first or second try, do your thing.
}).catch(function(error) {
  // Either a non network error or a failure after a retrial.
});

[washowasho]

Including the cordova-plugin-network-information corrected this issue for me. I confirmed that the 'navigator.onLine' was occasionally 'false', which I believe was causing Firebase to think there was an issue. Once I added the cordova-plugin-network-information to my project, the problem went away. I didn't dig deep into why, but I suspect this plugin has a better wrapper around the navigator which may be giving Firebase better information. I did confirm this problem came back after removing the plugin, but re-applying it fixes it. I will update this if I dig deeper. I hope this helps.

[washowasho]

Looks like this may have been solved in the latest release of Firebase 4.2.0. I'll be verifying when I get a chance.

"Refactored to not use navigator.onLine for offline detection in Cordova environments."

https://firebase.google.com/support/release-notes/js#4.2.0

[derwaldgeist]

I'm having this issue with Firebase 4.4.0, filed it as issue #168 which is probable a duplicate then.

On my device (HTC One), the problem appears most of the times, but sometimes the connection gets established. In its current state, it's a show-stopper for me. :-/

[derwaldgeist]

Can confirm that adding cordova-plugin-network-information solved the problem for 4.4.0, too, but adding a plugin just for this is not a nice solution.

For instance, any new plugin disables hot-code-push on MeteorJS and requires me to distribute my app through the stores (which includes iOS, even if the problem only exists on Android). So I would be happy to see a "proper" solution to this.

[bojeil-google]

Please do not open several duplicate issues for the same issue.
This issue is not related to our SDK and is related to navigator.onLine in Cordova.

[derwaldgeist]

It wasn't clear that this was the same problem. But I confirm that the problem is caused by navigator.onLine. Nevertheless, I would recommend that Firebase should use a more reliable mechanism than checking navigator.onLine. Effectively, it's not a problem with Cordova, but with Chrome on Android. It can be fixed by adding a Cordova plugin (which effectively implements an old W3C spec on top of navigator.onLine), but that's not a good solution, if you ask me.

[adamduren]

I attempted to fix the issue by tring the cordova-plugin-network-information fix with no success. Using [email protected]. It seems to always happen on every opening/start of the app.

[jshcrowthe]

@adamduren The original issue here was never reproduced such that we could actually triage the bug. If you can provide us a reproduction of the issue, we'd be happy to take a look.

[Treyphor]

I am having this issue as well on android. Except it is throwing this error when it tries to refresh the auth token I believe, because the user is already signed in. It seems like it has to do with something with the app being in the background for a while, and then resuming the app. I have tried installing the cordova-plugin-network-information plugin, but it didn't fix it. I can't provide an example to reproduce the issue 100% of the time, as it seems random when it happens to me, and the only error I see is the auth/network-request-failed. And I get this error until I restart my app completely. Is there any way I can get more info from the error? I can provide code snippets to illustrate what my code is doing. Anything I can do to help resolve this issue, It's driving my users insane. I'm willing to hop on discord or skype and teamviewer to help. But.. I am also using angularfire2 on top of this, so maybe the issue is in angularfire.

[adamduren]

I've been trying to reproduce this in an isolated repository and so far have been unable to. I've used UIWebView, WkWebView, as well as Ionic's WkWebView. So far no luck but I have a few other things to try.

[adamduren]

Here is a link to the block of code causing the issue for me along with a list of events that led up to the error from sentry. Using [email protected] now.

https://github.com/firebase/firebase-js-sdk/blob/firebase%404.10.1/packages/auth/src/iframeclient/iframewrapper.js#L107-L141

[adamduren]

It's taking 15 seconds from app launch to happen which is probably the iframe ping timeout.

fireauth.iframeclient.IframeWrapper.PING_TIMEOUT_ =
    new fireauth.util.Delay(5000, 15000);

[bojeil-google]

As far as I recall, we don't use the iframe in a Cordova environment.

[adamduren]

I'm not familiar with the codebase but it appears the IframeWrapper is used by IfcHandler which appears to be used in this cordova test.

[bojeil-google]

We just re-use some static method to construct the OAuth redirect URL: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-js-sdk/blob/bcc8983a0cae673bafc386935c64e9245c60c84c/packages/auth/test/cordovahandler_test.js#L1274
We don't embed an iframe in that environment as it is useless (we can't verify the origin of the parent page).

[adamduren]

@bojeil-google I made a project to reproduce the issue. Instructions in Readme.

[xam8re]

same here, with cordova.

[Vivek-abstract]

I configured the firebase fcm plugin and now im facing this issue too

[washowasho]

I found that the FCM Plugin does not play well with the Cordova Browser
tab... not sure if you are using the browser tab or not.

On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 9:36 AM, Vivek Gawande [e-mail]
wrote:

I configured the firebase fcm plugin and now im facing this issue too

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[Vivek-abstract]

Nvm I fixed it by doing cordova plugin rm cordova-plugin-whitelist cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-whitelist

[vycoder]

Using cordova app as well, it suddenly stopped working. I'm getting same error. I tried what @Vivek-abstract did, didn't work. Was using <plugin name="cordova-plugin-whitelist" spec="^1.3.3" />

[CiriousJoker]

Do not forget to allow apis.google.com within your csp, otherwise it won't work no matter how hard you try.

[rommelpe]

Hi y'all. I would like to check if you are still having issues or clarifications here. Just leave a comment and we are happy to look into it.

[google-oss-bot]

Hey @deoxen0n2. We need more information to resolve this issue but there hasn't been an update in 7 days. I'm marking the issue as stale and if there are no new updates in the next 3 days I will close it automatically.

If you have more information that will help us get to the bottom of this, just add a comment!

[google-oss-bot]

Since there haven't been any recent updates here, I am going to close this issue.

@deoxen0n2 if you're still experiencing this problem and want to continue the discussion just leave a comment here and we are happy to re-open this.