1396116 - Follow-up: Add Pocket referrer URI to Android Intents

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Awesomescreen, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

In bug 1393699, we added the Pocket referrer URI when a user clicks on a Pocket Top Story. However, it's possible the link we click can be opened with a native app. If we open in the app, we don't currently send a referrer URI and the property does not know this traffic came from Pocket.

This bug is to determine how we should resolve the problem of a property not knowing this traffic came from Pocket. After talking to Max from Pocket, here are some options:

1) We just open everything in the web: this isn't a great user experience but it makes sure the referrers happen.

2) We open in the browser and then immediately redirect to the app. This looks ugly but would get the job done. The code base isn't set up to easily do this, afaik.

3) We open in the app but make a background ping to the server to notify them a link was pressed. This is a good choice, if viable.

4) We investigate if other apps use the Intent.EXTRA_REFERRER field [1] and if so, send the referrer to those apps natively. This is also a good choice, if viable. We might have to have a different solution for apps that don't use this field, however. fwiw, I'd speculate it's probably easier for app developers to break this than to break web referrers.

---

Putting in the current sprint as a follow-up.

[1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html#EXTRA_REFERRER

Comment 1

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

NI Nate: do you have any thoughts on an appropriate approach? (Note: we have a conversation open in Slack so maybe we'll talk there and report back)

Comment 2

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Nate via slack:

I don't know what else you guys are tracking for this initial release, but assuming you have a a bunch of other stuff still on your list. IMHO for v1 I think we can just not worry about handling the referrer in the app open case (outside of adding it to the intent, knowing full well people may not look at it).

When we get some data for this in release, if the amount of clicks are significant to these sites (like Medium) we can look at solving this more holistically.

It's just not clear to me that this is going to impact a significant portion of traffic that would be worth building something somewhat hacky for

---

Sounds like we should add the referrer to the Android Intent and we can file a follow-up to look at the numbers for a future release.

Comment 3

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Shoot - I misread the code. We'll only ever open top sites links in the browser:

    public void onUrlOpen(String url, EnumSet<OnUrlOpenListener.Flags> flags) {
        if (flags.contains(OnUrlOpenListener.Flags.OPEN_WITH_INTENT)) {
            Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
            intent.setData(Uri.parse(url));
            startActivity(intent);
        } else {

OPEN_WITH_INTENT only ever gets added in PanelLayout & friends, which I believe were only used in dynamic panels added by add-ons, so we always fall into the else case which is to open links in the browser.

Comment 4

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

The code above comes from http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/51b3d67a5ec1758bd2fe7d7b6e75ad6b6b5da223/mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/BrowserApp.java#4136