Closed Bug 1009462 Opened 10 years ago Closed 10 years ago

Firefox OS homescreen Flickr icon takes me to an ad for Flickr's new iPhone app

Categories

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

ARM
Gonk (Firefox OS)
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

VERIFIED FIXED

People

(Reporter: hsivonen, Unassigned)

References

()

Details

(Whiteboard: [clientsniff][country-all] [sitewait])

(Not sure if I got the URL right. I can't figure out how to get at the URL on Firefox OS!)

Steps to reproduce:
 0) Have Flame connected to the Internet.
 1) Go to the home screen on the Flame phone
 2) Swipe sideways to get to the leftmost home screen.
 3) Tap the icon group labeled "Social"
 4) Wait for network-backed icons to load
 5) Tap the Flickr icon (rightmost on the second row for me)

Actual results:
You end up seeing a screen that says "Inspiring photography" followed by some items about what Flickr does for you followed by a button labeled "Get the new Flickr App". Tapping the button takes you to a desktop-oriented Web page for iTunes download. Seeing just the top left corner of the desktop layout is disorienting.

Once you go back to Flickr, you realize you should have tapped "Explore", "Nearby", "Search" or "Sign In" in a bar above the "Inspiring photography" title.

Expected results:
Expected the Flickr icon on the Firefox OS Social icon group to take me to a page on Flickr where the most obvious thing is exploring Flickr. Expected not to be baited by an iOS App Store link.
Moving to mobile component. Appears to be a client side user agent script at m.flickr.com that's recommending the iOS app. Firefox Android gets the same screen that recommends the Android app. We had a contact in bug #878638 for flickr that we could try.
Assignee: english-us → nobody
Component: English US → Mobile
Whiteboard: [clientsniff][country-all]
Hi Ross,
Could you help us with this one at Flickr?
Assignee: nobody → kdubost
Mentor: kdubost
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Flags: needinfo?(ross)
Whiteboard: [clientsniff][country-all] → [clientsniff][country-all] [sitewait]
Hi Karl,

The page that you are discussing is the signed-out Flickr homepage; it's shown to all devices that we consider to be phones or that go to m.flickr.com while logged-out of Flickr. 

Perhaps it would be better to direct people to the Explore page (https://m.flickr.com/explore/interesting/), if what you're looking for is photos to start exploring.
Flags: needinfo?(ross)
Ross, Thanks for the quick answer.

Henri,

did you see Ross' answer. It's not that much of a Web Compat issue than a design choice from Flickr. I would be tempted to close that bug. And you could take that issues into the forum of Flickr directly?

What do you think?
Flags: needinfo?(hsivonen)
(In reply to Ross Harmes from comment #3)
> The page that you are discussing is the signed-out Flickr homepage; it's
> shown to all devices that we consider to be phones or that go to
> m.flickr.com while logged-out of Flickr. 

Showing an advertisement for an iOS app to non-iOS phones leads to a very bad (confusing) user experience. It shouldn't be too hard not to show the ad to phone browsers whose UA string doesn't claim the browser to run on iPhone. Could you, please, do that?

(I don't see what benefit Flickr gets from showing an ad for an iOS app to users who are not using iOS. Surely Flickr doesn't intend this ad to make people go buy a different phone.)

> Perhaps it would be better to direct people to the Explore page
> (https://m.flickr.com/explore/interesting/), if what you're looking for is
> photos to start exploring.

It seems weird for Flickr to want to make their front page such that those who link to Flickr should want to take counter-measures and avoid linking to the front page.

(In reply to Karl Dubost :karlcow from comment #4)
> It's not that much of a Web Compat issue than a
> design choice from Flickr.

It's a remarkably bad design choice if kept around knowingly (as opposed to accident) and it's a design that makes the Firefox OS experience bad.

I think we should either keep this open as an evangelism bug in order to get Flickr to change their design choice not cause a bad (confusing) experience to Firefox OS users or morph this into a Smart Collections bug to request Flickr to be blocked in the smart collections or to manually have its URL curated not to go to the front page.

But I think we should not close this as long as the situation is that the out-of-the-box Firefox OS experience is that you get to a confusing ad for an iOS app (so confusing that it's not immediately clear it is an ad for an iOS app) with two taps from the default home screen arrangement.
Flags: needinfo?(hsivonen)
fwiw, 

WebOS receives the iPhone page.
Android browsers receive the Google Play page.
iOS devices receive the iPhone page.

It seems there are only two types of pages available. If both of you can find a solution, it's cool. :)
I'm un-assigning myself. Feel free to take over.
Assignee: kdubost → nobody
Mentor: kdubost
Status: ASSIGNED → NEW
Hi Henri,

Thanks for the feedback. Karl is correct in that we look for iOS and Android UAs on that page (those being the two platforms we have native apps for), and that the fallback is to promote our iOS app if neither is found. 

If you can confirm that the UA defined on https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Gecko_user_agent_string_reference is the best one to look for, I can send Firefox OS users to a more useful page.
(In reply to Ross Harmes from comment #8)
> If you can confirm that the UA defined on
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/
> Gecko_user_agent_string_reference is the best one to look for, I can send
> Firefox OS users to a more useful page.

The information at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Gecko_user_agent_string_reference#Firefox_OS is accurate, yes.

Thanks.
Thanks Henri.

I've made the change and deployed it to production. If you visit https://m.flickr.com/ with a Firefox OS Mobile UA string, you will be taken to Explore.
I have checked. Wonderful. Congrats on the work together.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 10 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
I confirm that navigating to https://m.flickr.com/ now goes to explore and already did 24h ago. Now (after waiting 24h--for cache expiry probably) tapping the icon in the Social smart collection takes me to explore, too.

Thank you!
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Product: Tech Evangelism → Web Compatibility
Component: Mobile → Site Reports
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