1346324 - Allow sending to multiple devices from Android

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Android Sync, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Julie McCracken (:julie)]

Issue discovered in March 7th Sync Fest.

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

rfeeley, adavis: is this feature implemented on Desktop?  Should it be implemented uniformly, so on Android and iOS as well?

Comment 2

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Desktop has "All Devices" option at the bottom of the devices list. I personally find it useful only for debugging (do we have telemetry on its usage on desktop?), but one way or the other we should strive for consistency across platforms.

Comment 3

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

I confirm that it is on Desktop.

I don't think we have telemetry specifically for this given feature. 

*However*, we might be able to deduct it soon. If we detect that a given share was triggered on 1 device and is then received appears on multiple device (via flow_id), it would be a good indicator that "send to all devices" was used.

But I think we're a few weeks out from getting that data in our dashboards.

Comment 4

[:Grisha Kruglov]

That seems like a job well suited for UI telemetry, to save you from having to write/run these queries. Can we add that in on desktop? Obviously it'll take time for it to either ride the trains or get uplifted, but at least we'll have it eventually. I'll make sure this is telemetrized on mobile once it's in place.

Comment 5

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

No need for validating with Telemetry unless we also want to do consider removing this feature from the other platforms. We have a way to select sending to one or more devices on iOS, and one or all devices on desktop. It's an issue of Firefox parity.

Tap interfaces lend themselves better to multi-select than desktop contextual menus.

I've updated the bug name to reflect, but a design is required first.

I'll work on it. Assigning to me.

Comment 6

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Keep in mind that we have at least two different ways to show this list on Android. Perhaps we should look into unifying that UX as well in the process.

We display an overlay list  when sharing from fennec itself: http://imgur.com/qqaWaip
We display a pop-up list when sharing from other apps to fennec: http://imgur.com/Y5AdrgH

Comment 7

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

(In reply to :Grisha Kruglov from comment #4)
> That seems like a job well suited for UI telemetry, to save you from having
> to write/run these queries. Can we add that in on desktop? Obviously it'll
> take time for it to either ride the trains or get uplifted, but at least
> we'll have it eventually. I'll make sure this is telemetrized on mobile once
> it's in place.

We landed event teletry which is suppose to be a new more awesome version of ui telemetry. But for it to work magically, it'll need to be added to mobile too. 

If we don't have a bug for landing the event telemetry for send tab on mobile yet, we should probably do that (but Sync telemetry needs to land first). It will allow us to measure the full send tab user funnel across devices. (Ui telemetry just tracks clicks)

See bug 1289536 for event telemetry details on desktop.

Comment 8

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Any updates on this?

Comment 9

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

I'm hoping Mark and/or Jack can help us here.

Comment 10

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

Anthony: do you think you have time to design the Android equivalent for selecting and sending more than one tab at a time?

Comment 11

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

I do! but they're not in the new Photon UI.

Perhaps this is something for Product to prioritize.

NI-ing Joe!

Joe, thoughts?

Comment 12

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

Anthony: Alex is the PM of the Sync feature on all devices, and Grisha is the engineer for Sync on mobile. All we need is an Android friendly design. I'll look up some multi-select examples.

Comment 13

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Comment 6 describes two different types of UI we have for this feature. I don't think this split is a good idea from a UX point of view - there's likely a "good reason" it's done this way which I'm not aware of, but I'm very much in favor of unifying this experience if possible.

So, one part of this work will be to implement the new multi-select interface (keeping the nice property of displaying device icons - http://imgur.com/qqaWaip), another part is the unification of the two Send Tab flows around one UI, and the final part is (hopefully minor) changes to the sync plumbing to make this all actually work.

Comment 14

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Clearing NI from Joe. This is a fairly obvious chunk of work that generally needs to be prioritized.

Alex, given that we have "send to multiple devices" send tab on iOS but _not_ on Desktop, how would you rate importance of this feature in relation to other work? Do we have any insight into user behaviour around this? Is this actually a valuable addition, are folks asking for this?

Comment 15

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

Given you believe that this is a fairly big chunk of work and I know that we already have a lot of important things in the pipe for Q3 to support 57 release, I would support putting this aside for now.

To my knowledge, there has not been any demand for this. (correct me if I'm wrong)

I do however understand that we want to the most consistent experience across devices so we should get back to this.

Comment 16

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

Alex: I don't believe Grisha is claiming that this is a "big" chunk of work, rather an "obvious" chunk.

We would just like it to be consistent with desktop and iOS, and can even use a standard Android pattern.

See "multiple-choice list"
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/dialogs.html

Comment 17

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

If it's easy, do it. But Grisha is really busy so I don't want to take much time away from him to do this.

Comment 18

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Let's keep this around as a P3 for now due to bandwidth considerations, with an eye on getting this over the line at an opportune moment (perhaps when we're tackling the send-tab revamp?).

This would be a perfect first intern project, btw.

Comment 19

[BMO Automation]

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