1398293 - Indicate more Sync/FxA error states

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Firefox Accounts, enhancement, P5)

Description

[:Grisha Kruglov]

It's possible for us to fail to obtain GCM tokens, for a variety of reasons. It's also possible to fail to register with Autopush in some other way, or to have our Autopush registration in a broken state.

It would be good to indicate to the user that something isn't functioning correctly. It's not always a user-recoverable issue, but sometimes it is. We now use push to make Send Tab speedier, and reporting push error states will help ensure less confusion, give users ability to try basic recovery, and will make for easier debugging.

Ideally we can be both specific in what our error state is ("no permission X", "server error", etc), and perhaps provide basic instructions on how to recover ("did you try turning it off and on again?").

I'm thinking that Sync prefs is a good place to put this. Perhaps a discardable system notification as well, showed the moment we discover we're in a broken state?

Comment 1

[:Grisha Kruglov]

One way to do this is following the footpath of state's getNeededAction() - add a "getError" method to FxA's State, which could cover error states which fall outside of the state machine. E.g. can't reach token server, disabled push, etc. This implies mutating final state of the state machine somewhere in the callbacks of FxAccountSyncAdapter.
We'll then be able to interrogate current error state in FxAccountStatusFragment and toggle an error banner.

I think it helps to think of a hierarchy of errors (as opposed to displaying multiple error states at once). E.g. only one, the most important error will be displayed at any one time. State's needAction takes precedence, then any additional error states.

Comment 3

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 4

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.