1051651 - Every web app APK ever is kept in Downloads

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Web Apps (PWAs), defect, P2)

Description

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Attachment: Screenshot_2014-08-10-19-25-03.png

Verified on two devices running Nightly. See screenshot.

These are dumped into /sdcard/Downloads.

This is pretty bad from a size perspective. Each app ranges from 33 to 73KB, so my phone has about 1.6MB of stale APKs hanging around. Presumably the more apps I install, and the more updates they push out, the worse this will get.

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

I think I've seen this before, but I'm having trouble reproducing it.  The runtime was designed to delete APKs after installing them (or failing to install them, because the user canceled the install, or the APK was invalid).  Somehow it isn't doing that, either intermittently or under particular circumstances.

Can you provide more info about the devices on which you verified the problem and the steps you followed to reproduce it?

I'm particularly interested in the version of Android on the devices, whether or not you have a third-party or alternative APK installer, whether you pressed Done or Open in the "confirm install" dialog (after installation was complete), and whether or not you have "don't keep activities" checked in Settings > Developer options > Apps.

Comment 2

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Mainly I saw this on my HTC One, which has Nightly (and sometimes Aurora) installed. I think I also saw it on my Nexus 10, which I use less frequently.

Both of these are Googly devices, standard APK installer, KitKat.

I see lots of "hey, there's an update ready to install for X" notifications, which I rarely click. So it's possible that these are downloaded APKs that haven't been installed, so haven't been deleted.

The listing in the screenshot implies that that's not necessarily the case, though. That'd be a lot of updates for Translator.

I would usually have tapped "Done", not "Open" after an install.

Perhaps each new downloaded update for an app should make sure the old versions are deleted?

Perhaps these should be downloaded to the Cache dir, so we don't chew up the user's Downloads?

Comment 3

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Per bug 1235869, we're going to disable the Android web runtime, so we won't fix this bug in it.

(This is part of a bulk resolution of bugs in the Firefox for Android::Web Apps component, from which I attempted to exclude bugs that are not specific to the runtime, but it's possible that I included one accidentally.  If so, I'm sorry, and please reopen the bug!)

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Myk: consider filing a bug to delete all web app APKs, profiles, etc.: users have no way of cleaning up themselves.

Comment 5

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to Richard Newman [:rnewman] from comment #4)
> Myk: consider filing a bug to delete all web app APKs, profiles, etc.: users
> have no way of cleaning up themselves.

I'm not sure how effectively we can distinguish stale APKs the runtime downloaded from other user downloads, and I'm loathe to get this wrong and delete something the user wants to keep, but I filed bug 1242786 to consider deleting stale APKs.

Regardless, we should be able to identify and delete profiles created by the runtime.  I filed bug 1242787 on that, although it may happen as part of bug 1235869.