1442330 - Stop producing Nightly oldid builds

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: Android Studio and Gradle Integration, enhancement)

Description

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

Let's first look at telemetry and find out how many users we still have running the oldid build.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

I do find these builds useful. It allows me to run o.m.fennec_aurora as my primary browser and use o.m.fennec as a browser for testing bugs.

I understand that the cost and complexity is non-trivial and it may be time to shut down the oldid.

Comment 2

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Looking at the "core ping" it seems like we can't distinguish the builds. We do not report the application id.

sylvestre, nalexander: Do you have an idea what other metric we could use? ADI? Crash Stats? Or maybe our own update service that only the oldid build should use?

Comment 3

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Calixte, do you remember how to do that?

Comment 4

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Depending on the number of affected users, it would be nice to get bug 1427794 working at least on Nightly only beforehand, so users could simply copy their profile over to the "new" Nightly (Sync doesn't cover everything, like add-ons or preferences).

Comment 5

[Calixte Denizet (:calixte)]

AFAIK we've nothing in neither telemetry nor crash-stats.
:sylvestre, maybe we could have numbers from Google Play.

Comment 6

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

I don't have such information in Google play as the old-id hasn't been uploaded here.
I will share some stats in private in my next comments but I guess this isn't a big deal if we just drop it.
Maybe we could use Leanplum to send a message to our users to use the Google play version or the other (aurora) id.

Comment 8

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

(In reply to Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian) from comment #2)
> Looking at the "core ping" it seems like we can't distinguish the builds. We
> do not report the application id.
> 
> sylvestre, nalexander: Do you have an idea what other metric we could use?
> ADI? Crash Stats? Or maybe our own update service that only the oldid build
> should use?

I am not really seeing anything other than the update service.  We used to use blocklist pings for this type of stuff, but I doubt they distinguish the Android package.  (I can't believe we don't include our own package in our telemetry ping!)

It looks like the oldid Apps use the same Leanplum registration details as the newid Apps, so it would be up to Leanplum to be able to target by Android package name.  I think Leanplum does this.

Comment 9

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

What do we need to make a decision here?

Or do we think that remaining users are few enough that we can simply turn these off?

Comment 10

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Andreas, could you have a look how we could use leanplum to target only users of the old nightly id? Thanks

Comment 11

[Andreas Bovens [:abovens]]

Sorry for the late follow-up. I'm afraid I can't help much with this, so let me loop in Jean.

Comment 12

[Jean Collings]

How do we know if they are using an old Nightly id? Is it by App version or OS version or something else? 

Here's the general targeting that can be done in Leanplum (and we have the Firefox Android Nightly app on Leanplum): 

https://support.leanplum.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003472403-Segment-and-target-criteria-options

Comment 13

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

(In reply to Jean Collings from comment #12)
> How do we know if they are using an old Nightly id? Is it by App version or
> OS version or something else? 
> 
> Here's the general targeting that can be done in Leanplum (and we have the
> Firefox Android Nightly app on Leanplum): 
> 
> https://support.leanplum.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003472403-Segment-and-
> target-criteria-options

I think the only way to distinguish is by application id.

Comment 14

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

Based on the number of requests we're seeing to Balrog, we can turn these off now.

Any users still on these should re-install the regular version of Fennec Nightly.

Comment 15

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

Attachment: Bug 1442330: Remove android old-id builds

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/233256/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/233256/

Comment 16

[Johan Lorenzo [:jlorenzo]]

Comment on attachment 8964531 [details]
Bug 1442330: Remove android old-id builds

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/233256/#review238856

Great to see this code deleted! I ran a few commands[1] to see if some references were missed. The only occurence was this folder:
> mobile/android/branding/nightly-old-id

Do we want to keep it?

[1] find . -iregex '.*old[^a-zA-Z]id.*' ; rg -i 'old[^a-zA-Z]id'

Comment 17

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

(In reply to Johan Lorenzo [:jlorenzo] from comment #16)
> Comment on attachment 8964531 [details]
> Bug 1442330: Remove android old-id builds
> 
> https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/233256/#review238856
> 
> Great to see this code deleted! I ran a few commands[1] to see if some
> references were missed. The only occurence was this folder:
> > mobile/android/branding/nightly-old-id
> 
> Do we want to keep it?
> 
> [1] find . -iregex '.*old[^a-zA-Z]id.*' ; rg -i 'old[^a-zA-Z]id'

No, get rid of branding/nightly-old-id -- those directories correspond to the mozconfigs that are being removed.

Comment 18

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

Comment on attachment 8964531 [details]
Bug 1442330: Remove android old-id builds

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/233256/diff/1-2/

Comment 19

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

Good catch - I removed those files in the latest version of the patch on mozreview.

Comment 20

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/8f3d33f7c72b
Remove android old-id builds r=jlorenzo

Comment 21

[Andrei Ciure[:aciure]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8f3d33f7c72b