Add Anonymous Users

Allow guest users to use your apps and website and promote to regular users later.

Overview

You can use the Anonymous Users feature to create an anonymous user account for the guests in your apps so that they can carry out interactions just like a normal user. For example, guests can post comments and save preferences in your social platform before setting their email and password. The user session will persist even if the app has been closed.

This improves the app experience because the user does not need to set up authenticators until further down the user journey, while still enjoying most of the app features. For app developers, the ability to create and assign Anonymous Users also makes it easier to link the activities of an individual before and after sign-up.

Note: The Anonymous Users feature will only work for Authgear Client Applications of type: Native App, Single Page Application, and Traditional Web Application.

OIDC/SAML Client Application type does not support Anonymous Users. Hence, your application using this client application type will get an error when you try to create anonymous users.

Enable Anonymous Users for your project

  1. In the portal, go to Authentication > Anonymous Users.

  2. Turn on Enable anonymous users.

  3. Save the settings.

Using the SDK

Sign up as an Anonymous User

This will create an Anonymous User for the session. Subsequent requests from the end-user in the session can be identified by the same sub

authgear
    .authenticateAnonymously()
    .then(({userInfo}) => {
        // Logged in as anonymous user successfully
    })
    .catch((err) => {
        // Handle the error
    });

Check the UserInfo object

After "signing up" as an anonymous user, you can retrieve the "UserInfo" object and see the sub of the end-user.

UserInfo

{
  "sub": "...",
  "isVerified": false,
  "isAnonymous": true
}

Promotion of an Anonymous User

The promoteAnonymousUser function can be called to promote an anonymous user to a regular user. You'll call the function with a login ID (e.g., email, phone number) and authenticators (e.g., password). The end-user will be prompted with a sign-up page to complete the promotion. The sub of the end-user will remain the same after the promotion.

authgear
    .promoteAnonymousUser({
        redirectURI: THE_REDIRECT_URI,
    })
    .then(({userInfo}) => {
        // Promote anonymous user successfully
    })
    .catch((e) => {
        // Handle the error
    });

User Lifetime

Mobile apps

On Mobile SDKs, creating an anonymous user will create a key-pair. The key-pair is stored in the native encrypted store on the mobile device. The end-user can always re-login to the same anonymous user with the key-pair. Such anonymous user will become inaccessible when the encrypted store is removed.

Web apps and websites

On the Web SDK, there will be no key-pair created. Therefore, the end-user will not be able to login to the same Anonymous User after their session becomes invalid. For cookie-based authentication, it is controlled by the "idle timeout" and "session lifetime" of the Cookie. For token-based authentication, it is controlled by the "idle timeout" and "token lifetime" of the Refresh Token.

In other words, the anonymous user account lifetime is the same as the logged-in session lifetime.

To adjust the lifetime settings, change the timeouts and lifetimes in Portal > Applications accordingly.

Caution for high-traffic websites

You should create anonymous users only when necessary in the user journey to prevent creating excessive orphan accounts in your tenant.

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