1453784 - Intent: link package parameter should only be used if package not installed

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Glenn Linderman]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180323154952

Steps to reproduce:

Trying to make an intent: link to open a Google Spreadsheet.

It seems the intent links are of the form:

intent://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11JJjoe244k3JKWYv9GY-YCLO9k6FdA8ZddGXjxF9LEg/edit#gid=954288472&range=K20#Intent;scheme=https;action=android.intent.action.VIEW;category=android.intent.category.DEFAULT;category=android.intent.category.BROWSABLE;package=com.google.android.apps.docs;end


Actual results:

Always goes to Play Store


Expected results:

If the app is already installed, it should go directly to the app, rather than the Play Store.

Dropping the package part is a workaround, but then it fails when the app isn't installed:

intent://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11JJjoe244k3JKWYv9GY-YCLO9k6FdA8ZddGXjxF9LEg/edit#gid=954288472&range=K20#Intent;scheme=https;action=android.intent.action.VIEW;category=android.intent.category.DEFAULT;category=android.intent.category.BROWSABLE;end

Related bug that seems to have implemented intent: links: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851693

Comment 1

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

Thanks for filing.

[triage] Non-critical.

Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to investigate further into why this happens. If you were interested, my suggestion would be to stop the debugger in the offending bit of code (you can probably figure out where from bug 851693) to identify why package seems to override the other behavior. fwiw, these intent:// links have caused a lot of trouble in the past so this fix may have been added to fix some technically incorrect but existing behavior on a large number websites. Do you have the same issues in Chrome?

Comment 2

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Closing per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Contact :susheel if you think this bug should be re-opened

Comment 3

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

We divert to the Play Store at [1], which happens when we believe that no app capable of handling that intent is installed and therefore call IntentHelper.openNoHandler().

Now I didn't verify this through actually debugging, but the code at [2] looks somewhat suspicious: My guess is that that statement about the Android Application Chooser always being among the list of handlers is only true when the incoming Intent doesn't specify an explicit package. If the Intent *does* have an explicit package, then I guess that the handler list will either contain the specified app, or nothing.

The current code obviously assumes that the app chooser will always be among the list of handlers and hence there is no point in actually firing off that intent if there is only one handler, i.e. the app chooser itself. Now obviously that assumption doesn't hold, but unfortunately from bug 851581 it's not quite clear whether there are any circumstances under which the Android OS would really return a list of handlers that contains only the app chooser dialogue and nothing else.

It might be safe to simply modify the condition to read "aHandler.possibleApplicationHandlers.length > 0", or maybe we need to find some way of actually identifying the presence of the Android Application Chooser within the list of handlers and then subtract it from the total count. In any case, any fix should be checked with different devices/OS versions, as the details of Intent handling in Android might have varied over the years.

[1] https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c291143e24019097d087f9307e59b49facaf90cb/mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/IntentHelper.java#518
[2] https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c291143e24019097d087f9307e59b49facaf90cb/mobile/android/components/ContentDispatchChooser.js#52-54

Comment 4

[BMO Automation]

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