Recent removal of Play Services dependency from Firebase-auth

[RPCarter53]

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Step 2: Describe your environment

• Android device: Any but Fire tablet would be a good case in point
• Android OS version: N/A
• Google Play Services version: N/A
• Firebase/Play Services SDK version: N/A
• FirebaseUI version: 6.4.0

Step 3: Describe the problem:

The latest release of Firebase-auth has removed the dependency on Google Play Service and yet FirebaseUI-auth still has this dependency. Is there any prospect of this being removed in the near future.

Steps to reproduce:

1. ---

2. ---

3. ---

Observed Results:

• What happened? This could be a description, logcat output, etc.

Expected Results:

• What did you expect to happen?

Relevant Code:

// TODO(you): code here to reproduce the problem

[samtstern]

@RPCarter53 please don't file empty issues, there's no way I can know what you're asking.

If you're wondering if we can remove the Play services dependency from FirebaseUI: maybe in the long term, but not immediately. The reason is that Google Sign In still requires Play services and untangling that dependency is going to be a pretty big project!

But I do hope we can get there eventually.

[RPCarter53]

Thanks for the prompt response. The issue we have with Play Services is always the Amazon Fire tablets which is my some way our biggest market place. I was rather hopeful when I saw that the dependency had been removed from the underlying Firebase library. Is there any possibility of the dependency being linked just to Google Sign which I believe we could do without in the short term?

[samtstern]

@RPCarter53 yeah we'd just have to do some refactoring first! Here's a quick glance at all the places the play-services-auth library is used within our code:
https://github.com/firebase/FirebaseUI-Android/search?q=com.google.android.gms.auth

We need to isolate that usage to just a few files and then guard the usage of those files on some runtime checks for certain classes, otherwise we risk crashing a lot.

[RPCarter53]

Thanks Sam for the update. I think for now I will go with the underlying firebase-auth and just link with facebook login. I will keep an eye on firebaseUI and pick up when this dependency is gone.