1169748 - Consider how app links should be handled in Android M

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

Android M adds 'app linking', which you can read about here: http://developer.android.com/preview/api-overview.html#app-linking

Brad thinks maybe we should automatically open top-level URLs in the associated app when we encounter one that has a strong link like this. What does UX think?

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Ni for Anthony and Margaret to own this decision.

Comment 2

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

I think users already on M should/will expect this. I've always liked our little Android dude in the toolbar but this goes one step further and the user doesn't even need to tap that. 

I'd be up for doing this for our M users. 

Question: what is a "strong link"? and can we get a build to test this?

Comment 3

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

I'm curious how this pans out. The result seems like it might ignore the users selected app for (for example) "twitter.com" links in favor of whatever the official "twitter.com" app is (if its also installed).

Comment 4

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

There is more info about app linking here: http://developer.android.com/preview/features/app-linking.html

There doesn't appear to be a sample app for this, so we'll need to write one it looks like.

Comment 5

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Wesley Johnston (:wesj) from comment #3)
> I'm curious how this pans out. The result seems like it might ignore the
> users selected app for (for example) "twitter.com" links in favor of
> whatever the official "twitter.com" app is (if its also installed).

I remember hearing there is a way to override this in your apps settings, but yeah, that's just another hurdle to cross. But maybe most users would want the official app anyway, especially if they have that app installed.

I'm not so sure about whether or not we should automatically open the app for top-level URLs... do you mean we would open the app if the user hits a link to "http://twitter.com" from within the browser? How often would that even happen? And wouldn't that feel inconsistent with links to more specific URLs?

We could make a sample app to play around with this, but I think the final call about the behavior here belongs to Karen and Anthony.

Comment 7

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

App links are handled at the OS level (when launching Intents). So there's not much to do for us.