1297435 - Firefox disallows adb backup on android

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1190375

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[zvvqjeoh]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20160813173522
Firefox for Android

Steps to reproduce:

adb backup


Actual results:

empty .ab file


Expected results:

Please undo https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/d5e6dc2b693c
(remove android:allowBackup="false" from AndroidManifest.xml)

As discussed earlier https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1021742 preventing backups is not reasonable.

Thanks.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Having Android back up and restore profile data is not something we want. It was causing corrupted profiles. I don't believe we will be reverting that change. NI to Sebastian to confirm.

Comment 2

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

(In reply to Kevin Brosnan [:kbrosnan] from comment #1)
> Having Android back up and restore profile data is not something we want. It
> was causing corrupted profiles. I don't believe we will be reverting that
> change. NI to Sebastian to confirm.

That's correct. Android 6.0 introduced an Auto Backup feature [1]. This means that the device creates backups automatically and uploads them to Google's cloud. Those backups are restored automatically the next time the app is installed on any device.

We noticed that this feature will also backup and restore accounts automatically. This (and potentially more) is unwanted and can lead to a bunch of problems. That's why we decided to disable auto backup. Unfortunately all backup mechanisms (cloud backup vs. adb backup) are controlled by the same manifest flag -> adb backup is disabled too; even though this was not our intention.

Eventually we might be able to re-enable the feature after crafting a working black- or whitelist: bug 1190375.

[1] https://developer.android.com/training/backup/autosyncapi.html

Comment 3

[zvvqjeoh]

Not being able to back up the profile locally AT ALL is a much bigger problem from a user's perspective than having a broken cloud backup for those who use google's spy^H^H services.
It would be nice to have a separate build that doesn't cripple adb backup intentionally.