1239022 - Use Google Play's "staged rollout" for shipping Firefox for Android

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

The Google Play store supports a simple percentage based staged rollout for Android applications.  It appears very easy to use and should work with our existing scheme:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/3131213?hl=en

We'd like to discuss using this for Firefox for Android 44, since our crash rate seems to be abnormally high in Beta 44 and we don't want to shed users when we transition to release.

In discussion with mfinkle, we identified two major costs:

1) there is some human intervention required to set and update the rollout percentages over time.  This appears to be relatively low impact.

2) there is significant cost to interpreting early crash data.  That is, we need to invest in monitoring the signal from the early rolled out versions and taking appropriate action.

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

sylvestre: who handles Google Play updates these days?  Can you redirect as appropriate, please.

Has release management ever used this staged rollout system?  Is it possible, in the 43 -> 44 rollout timeframe?  Even if it's not, we'd like to "exercise this muscle" so that we're ready to use the tool the next time we have significant concerns about a flaky train riding to release.

Comment 2

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

The release managers are managing the GP updates. We can do that, that shouldn't be hard to do.

Comment 3

[Justin Wood (:Callek)]

please note that if we plan to push fennec 44 to x% of users, but also have a fennec 43 stability/sec release, that --> based on my last understanding of play store and build system dynamics we'd need to build 43's release before 44's release, (for buildid's) to not downgrade 44 users to the 43 stability

AIUI this is because Google Play will *always* offer the "latest" version that matches the supported devices.

That is why we munge the buildid slightly for x86, armv6, etc and used to upload them in the specific order.

So we likely need to care about the same thing for the idea of doing a 43 stability of fennec if we also expect to have a 44 build released to same audience.

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Justin Wood (:Callek) from comment #3)
> based on my last understanding
> of play store and build system dynamics we'd need to build 43's release
> before 44's release, (for buildid's) to not downgrade 44 users to the 43
> stability

Correct.

> That is why we munge the buildid slightly for x86, armv6, etc and used to
> upload them in the specific order.

For reference:

https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/python/mozbuild/mozbuild/android_version_code.py#33

Comment 5

[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.