Hi Sean! Thanks for bringing this up.

My thoughts on this is that for the receiving end (Firebase), they want to prevent abuse and spam requests from the client. It's a bit expensive to send SMS codes to international users. Firebase is just limiting abuse.

However, in the more recent docs, they now support Invisible ReCAPTCHA (allows verification without user interaction), but this feature is still experimental in Expo.

I agree, they have different use cases and not a neat UX, but that's as far as I have read from the docs.

Let me know if this answers your question.