1319082 - Send Tab shows disconnected devices

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1386017

(Firefox for iOS :: Sync, defect, P1)

Description

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

Attachment: Doing some QA at 5AM, 14 devices though I only have 6

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Sync several devices
2. Send a tab from iOS
3. Disconnect a device in fxa/settings
4. Wait any period of time, even weeks
5. Send a tab

EXPECTED RESULTS
- List of connected devices is shown

ACTUAL RESULTS
- List of all current and previously connected devices is shown

Comment 1

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

On step 3, how are you disconnecting the device?

If on an Android device: Bug 963446.

If on an iOS device: Bug 1168690.

If through Device Manager or something else… well, they can't actually remove data from your Sync account!


Devices _should_ age out of the device list after three weeks. It's quite possible that on iOS we don't locally obey that TTL, but I don't see a bug on file.

In short: this is currently expected behavior, and nobody has been sufficiently motivated to do the work needed to fix it.

Comment 2

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

> If through Device Manager or something else… well, they can't actually remove data from your Sync account!

Is this because we haven't implemented the device registration API on iOS to properly identify a user's device?

> Devices _should_ age out of the device list after three weeks. It's quite possible that on iOS we don't locally obey that TTL, but I don't see a bug on file.


I'll investigate and see if we need a bug on file for this.

Comment 3

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Stephan Leroux [:sleroux] from comment #2)
> > If through Device Manager or something else… well, they can't actually remove data from your Sync account!
> 
> Is this because we haven't implemented the device registration API on iOS to
> properly identify a user's device?

No. AIUI, the FxA web device manager simply doesn't know enough to reach into the user's sync account and delete the corresponding record.

The first two bugs I linked to are about us not deleting the data ourselves.

Comment 4

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

The device list on the web is up-to-date. Do you think this is still an FxA issue? I'll loop our team in if so.

Comment 5

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Only if you deleted the device through the web, and expected it to be removed from Sync.

If you just disconnected your FxA on Android or iOS, then this bug is a nice simple dupe -- see Comment 1.

Comment 6

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

> AIUI, the FxA web device manager simply doesn't know enough to reach into the user's sync account
> and delete the corresponding record.

This is accurate, and FxA doesn't have enough information to do this correctly even if it wanted to.

> Only if you deleted the device through the web, and expected it to be removed from Sync.

But this is a totally reasonable expectation for a user to have, so we should figure out a path forward here.

My tentative proposal is that we should start treating the FxA device list as canonical - if you're not in the FxA device list, you're not connected to sync and shouldn't show up in any of the client-side sync devices UI.

* FxA will now auto-create a "placeholder" device record for sync clients that don't know how to do it themselves, so there's minimal risk of a device being missing from the FxA list.

* It's much easier for the user to manage the FxA list than the one in the clients collection in sync, meaning users can effectively purge their old devices.

Of course, I've no sense of how complicated that might get for the client-side code!  But it seems like the "right" thing to work towards.

Comment 7

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

(In reply to Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly] from comment #6)
> My tentative proposal is that we should start treating the FxA device list
> as canonical - if you're not in the FxA device list, you're not connected to
> sync and shouldn't show up in any of the client-side sync devices UI.
> 

Now that we're storing `fxaDeviceId` locally, this is my plan to resolve this bug.

Comment 9

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

Moving to 9.0, but can be moved back to 8.x if there is a patch.