1172633 - Investigate FxAndroid interactions with Doze/battery (Android M)

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

Android M will include some power improvements that will conserve battery when the device is not plugged in and the screen is off.

From the "What's new in Android" talk (t=10:55):
* In Doze (sitting on a table, detected by accelerometer): Wait longer to wake for background tasks
* In App Standby (days): Unused apps lose network access for background tasks

This bug is to investigate what changes we might need to make to Firefox for Android. This will likely affect MozStumbler.

Comment 1

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

I have Android M Preview running on my daily driver phone. Let me know if I can help and should monitor something in particular.

Comment 2

[:garvan]

re: MozStumbler

This is good for stumbler, as in the stand-alone app we have been doing this behaviour manually (and painfully, it is very difficult to do this on the app level).

We need to investigate this behaviour first in Mozilla Stumbler, and ensure it behaves as advertised. 
Added bug for stand-alone case: https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler/issues/1659

The use-case(s) for when Fennec stumbler should be awake and ready to collect is when the user is interacting with an app at it requires a single location (i.e. a location-requiring web page in Fennec, or apps that require single location like weather apps), or is running an app that is tracking their movements (navigation apps, exercise tracking apps, web pages tracking movement on a map). I think those use cases are unaffected.

Comment 3

[:garvan]

(In reply to :Sebastian Kaspari from comment #1)
> I have Android M Preview running on my daily driver phone. Let me know if I
> can help and should monitor something in particular.

If you could run Mozilla Stumbler https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler and see if it works ok that would help.

Checking stumbler in Fennec is a bit obtuse, but possible, it requires doing:
`adb shell setprop log.tag.PassiveStumbler DEBUG`

And then my suggested steps would be:
- make sure Mozilla Stumbler is killed so as not to confuse you looking at adb logs
- make sure you are opted-in to Fennec stumbling (contribute to Mozilla Location Service in the Fennec settings)
- After the device has gone to doze mode with Fennec not as the foreground app, wake the device, go to a standalone app that uses location
- adb logcat | grep Stumbler
- look for any matching messages, which will indicate the stumbler service is alive

Comment 4

[houmles]

Hi,

I apologize if this doesn't belong here. Just want to inform you or get some info instead of creating new bug regarding new Android power saving feature Doze.
I am using Firefox as my only browser on Android and after upgrading to 6.0 Marshmallow my Firefox is geting killed by something I can't find.
If I leave phone on table, it enters the sleep state and if I wake it after 30min and more and try to open Firefox again it starts "fresh" and starts reloading all tabs. In previous Android version (5.1.1) this was not a problem but now it is.
I excluded Firefox from battery optimization setting but is looks like it's doesn't affect it at all.
I tried to completely disable Doze by issuing "adb shell dumpsys deviceidle disable" but this doesn't work too. Tested this also in clean profile and also did backup of my whole system to test it on clean system with just Firefox installed.
Nightly builds have the same issue.
Why I am writing here is because Chrome don't suffer from this issue. If I exclude Chrome from battery optimization it runs forever and not tabs/pages are killed.
It looks like Firefox is not 100% prepared for Doze/App standby mode introduced in new Android. Can someone confirm this? Is there something I can help to test/debug?

Thanks.

Comment 5

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

Is this something that you've seen before, Sebastian?

Comment 6

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

(In reply to Chenxia Liu [:liuche] from comment #5)
> Is this something that you've seen before, Sebastian?

No, I haven't seen any Doze related issues so far.

@houmles: Do you have "Settings -> Advanced -> Restore tabs" enabled? Feel free to file a new bug specifically about the issues you are seeing with Doze.

Comment 7

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

fwiw, there are explicit ways to test Doze & Standby, via adb commands:

https://developer.android.com/training/monitoring-device-state/doze-standby.html?utm_campaign=android_launch_n_030916&utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog#testing_doze_and_app_standby

Comment 8

[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.