1300620 - when signing in to sync for the fist time on a phone and confirming on a pc the phone reports unconfirmed account until browser page is closed

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Android Background Services Graveyard :: Firefox Accounts, defect)

Description

[jason david]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36 Edge/14.14393
Firefox for Android

Steps to reproduce:

first time sign in to sync from phone, confirm on pc, leave browser open


Actual results:

sync reported unconfirmed account until browser was closed


Expected results:

sync should have reported account confirmed without the need to close browser window

Comment 1

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

Thanks for the report!

> leave browser open

When you say "leave browser open", do you mean you've leaving it on the page with the picture of an envelope that says "Confirm this sign-in"?

Comment 2

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to jason david from comment #0)
> User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36
> (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36 Edge/14.14393
...
> first time sign in to sync from phone, confirm on pc, leave browser open

To be clear, you used Edge to confirm on the PC, right? (That shouldn't make a difference, but it's worth clarifying)

> sync reported unconfirmed account until browser was closed

Until Edge was closed, or until the browser on Android was closed? How long did you wait before closing?

I believe Firefox for Android still polls for account verification, so some lag is expected.

Comment 3

[jason david]

Edge, yes. until the tab of edge was closed. android, yes. I waited maybe a minute or two.


(In reply to Mark Hammond [:markh] from comment #2)
> (In reply to jason david from comment #0)
> > User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36
> > (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36 Edge/14.14393
> ...
> > first time sign in to sync from phone, confirm on pc, leave browser open
> 
> To be clear, you used Edge to confirm on the PC, right? (That shouldn't make
> a difference, but it's worth clarifying)
> 
> > sync reported unconfirmed account until browser was closed
> 
> Until Edge was closed, or until the browser on Android was closed? How long
> did you wait before closing?
> 
> I believe Firefox for Android still polls for account verification, so some
> lag is expected.

Comment 4

[jason david]

I have already pressed the confirmation and it opened a tab when I closed that tab is when the phone instantly reported sync account confirmed.

(In reply to Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly] from comment #1)
> Thanks for the report!
> 
> > leave browser open
> 
> When you say "leave browser open", do you mean you've leaving it on the page
> with the picture of an envelope that says "Confirm this sign-in"?

Comment 5

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Grisha, how does Android check for account verification? I'm fairly sure that closing a tab in Edge isn't going to trigger any special behaviour, so I'm wondering if this can be explained as a coincidence (ie, that Android was polling at a slow enough rate that it took a minute or 2 between the user visiting the verification page and Android noticing?

Comment 6

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Let me investigate; I'm wondering if this is the same issue as the one I've observed in Bug 1292384.

Comment 7

[:Grisha Kruglov]

(doesn't seem relevant to Bug 1292384).

The fxa-content-server hosted "verification" page polls account status every 2-4 seconds from what I can tell (I'm not sure if it communicates verified state up to java land... as far as I can see it doesn't seem like it?). Android Sync itself also seems to check every now and then (but not more frequently than around 90 seconds, I think).

If the "verified" state made its way to the server, any clients polling for it will receive it in time according to their polling intervals. Closing the page that verified the account does seem like a timing coincidence.

The 90 second sync polling interval might explain "a minute or two" lag, if the fxa-content-server page was closed on the phone, and user was looking at Sync preferences, for example.

Comment 8

[Chris Karlof [:ckarlof]]

Ryan, given that "chrome" level push is now on Firefox Android, can we potentially improve this using our push-powered verification flow in FxA?

Comment 9

[:Grisha Kruglov]

(In reply to Chris Karlof [:ckarlof] from comment #8)
> Ryan, given that "chrome" level push is now on Firefox Android, can we
> potentially improve this using our push-powered verification flow in FxA?

This TODO seems to be pertinent: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/services/src/main/java/org/mozilla/gecko/fxa/FxAccountPushHandler.java#41

Comment 10

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

> given that "chrome" level push is now on Firefox Android,
> can we potentially improve this using our push-powered verification flow in FxA?

Yep, that's the plan!  I'm not totally across the use of bugzilla by the mobile teams, would it be appropriate to morph this bug into a "support push-driven verification on Android" bug, or should I open a fresh one for that?

Comment 11

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Let's open a new one, this one seems to be rather specific.

Comment 12

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

Whoops, I totally forgot to actually *file* said new bug; here's Bug 1309791 for completeness.

I don't think there's any further action we can take in this bug, as it sounds like this was just a result of unfortunate timing within the parameters of known current behaviour.