Intermittent Token Refresh Failures Affecting a Subset of Users.

[awais-wego]

Hey, Team!
I am using the following method to refresh the Firebase authentication token and send it to our backend for user verification. However, for a small subset of users, this Firebase method fails to refresh the token. I have attempted alternative approaches, but the issue persists. The failure occurs randomly and not consistently.

Could you please suggest a reliable solution to address this issue? Below is the current implementation I am using:

authStateUnsubscribe = auth().onAuthStateChanged(async (user) => {
    if (user) {
        try {
            // Get the current token, with refresh if necessary
            const token = await user?.getIdToken(true);
            // Send the token to the backend for verification
            authenticateUserToken(token, cancelTokenSource);
        } catch (error) {
            console.error('Error fetching Firebase ID token', error);
        }
    } else {
        // Handle the case where the user is not signed in
    }
});

Previously, I handled the token refresh logic as follows:

        const currentUser = auth().currentUser;
if (currentUser) {
    currentUser
        .getIdToken(true)
        .then((token) => {
            authenticateUserToken(token, cancelTokenSource);
        })
        .catch((error) => {
            console.error('Firebase error getting token', error);
        });
}

Any guidance on resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[mikehardy]

Apologies, I don't have anything specific but I wonder if the refresh may have something to do with network status or latency or limitations of some sort. Stated differently, perhaps with some number of retries with an incremental backoff in retry interval might work, in combination with logging out network state to check the hypothesis