1047761 - Display an actionable notification when the install is corrupt

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

We know that installs infrequently end up in a corrupted state -- see the comments in Bug 1042935.

Sometimes the culprit is us (oops, wrong library architecture!), sometimes a custom ROM doing something weird, but usually it seems to be Play/Android.

Some of these situations are pseudo-recoverable: we can manually guess library paths, and even attempt to extract .so files into storage (at the cost of cutting into the user's precious disk space).

This isn't an ideal solution, particularly for those poor users with small storage areas. It definitely isn't a long-term solution -- stale copies of libmozglue will eventually crash with missing symbols.

Some of these situations are not recoverable at all: e.g., the ones where Android has incorrectly decided to allocate a new UID to an overlay APK, and thus we don't even have a library directory.

I would like us to do two things:

* In the former, suggest that the user's Firefox installation has become corrupt, and it's now limping along. Please uninstall and reinstall.

* In the latter, report that Firefox is unable to start (instead of crashing), and needs to be reinstalled.


Ideally we will also implement profile backup and reinstall (useful for switching phones, too!), which makes this less of a "sorry, you're screwed" and more of an inconvenience.

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.