Move to separate native locks or downgrade to webview login

[bartolkaruza]

We are running into this blocking issue auth0/Lock.Android#188. As I'm researching a fix for that issue, I notice you deprecated the whole react-native-lock library in favor of the 'getting started' approach.

The getting started guide basically advices using .webAuth and opening Lock in a browser, which I consider a downgrade in usability and perceived security, compared to native login screens. So my next option would be to look at the platform specific Lock at https://github.com/auth0/Lock.Android and https://auth0.com/docs/libraries/lock-ios/v2. I feel hesitant to proceed, as this is basically what the react-native-lock package did for us and I don't know if those native locks will be supported in the long term or deprecated just like react-native-lock? Also, they add a lot of platform specific complexity to our project.

My next step is to (unfortunately) roll our own against your API's, rendering a minimal login screen directly in React Native.

I understand that supporting SDK's for all the various platforms is a moving target for you, but will you please consider creating a proper JS based react-native-lock version?

Considering React Native is so close to web, this could be a simple port of the web version (also in React). I'm more than willing to help out on this if you (Auth0) want to commit to supporting it long term. It would help making Auth0 the de-facto standard authentication option for RN developers.

[aaguiarz]

We don’t currently have plans for implementing Lock for React Native and for any other new native platform.

We firmly believe that moving to centralized login is the way to go for the industry, and we plan to invest and evangelize that approach. It’s more secure, more powerful and simpler to use for developers.

We understand that there are scenarios where our customers would want embed the login dialog in their apps. We’ll keep supporting those scenarios and OAuth2 flows, and provide guidance on how to do it. For React Native specifically, we are going to create samples on how to build a custom UI so customers can start from there.

There’s a document explaining the trade-off between native vs browser here
https://auth0.com/docs/tutorials/browser-based-vs-native-experience-on-mobile.

Regards

[lukewlms]

@aaguiarz Checking in as it's been two months - are such docs available now?