1252569 - Consider adding google app indexing deep links for Firefox content

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

As best as I understand it, the idea is that deep links into your apps can show up in Google search results (e.g. you search a restaurant and the search results have a link directly to the restaurant in yelp).

We should consider adding deep links into our application. While it seems most intuitive for, "This native app duplicates content on the web but it may be more convenient to open it in the app for whatever reason", we might be able to use it for "Bookmarks" or "Reading List".

The concept is a little funky because:
  1) the user may already be in Firefox because they're reading the search results (in which case, we should make sure these deep links appear – bug 1252564). However, we can still present a link to the user's history or reading list from the search results (e.g. how users google for facebook rather than just going to facebook; note that some users may think their history is in the google search results and find that creepy so we should be careful).
  2) the user is using another browser or the Google app, in which case we could potentially re-engage users with features we have that other browsers or apps do not (e.g. reading list)

As best as I can tell, we don't currently support these features [1] but we already include the library (though some of it likely proguarded out) for the Adjust installation.

[1]: https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?string=appindex&find=mobile%2Fandroid&findi=&filter=^[^\0]*%24&hitlimit=&tree=mozilla-central

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

We definitely don't do anything to support app indexing yet.  Post Bug 1247047, I expect we won't ship it at all, and then we'd want to have a discussion about why we would ship it.

Comment 2

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

NI Barbara so she sees this.

(In reply to Barbara Bermes [:barbara] from bug 1252564 comment #2)
> If we are the client, I'm not sure if this would be very useful as I'm not
> sure what stuff we would deep link to in our app? We are not an app like
> Yelp or Facebook that provides content, we are the window to web content.

I provided some examples in comment 0.

> Mike, by looking at code etc, how much effort would this be to implement?

I'd estimate between 2 to 3 days of work. The difficult bit is correctly declaring the end-points for our deep-linking and the unknown that is testing this functionality.

> I'd ask "WHY (now)?"? Would this, at any point, be driving engagement? I
> need to be convinced.

It could be an interesting way to drive installs or re-engagement – users search something like, "reading list", Firefox pops up, and users can be delighted that Firefox has a reading list they may not have known about.

Comment 3

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

Added Aha card for discussion: https://mozilla.aha.io/features/FENN-460

Comment 4

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