1602000 - Account login requires a smartphone number; I don't own one.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Cloud Services :: Server: Firefox Accounts, defect)

Description

[Lyle Ramshaw]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox on Win10 prompted me, this morning, to login to my Firefox account, probably to sign me up for "Monitor" or the like. But the login process required me to provide a smartphone number, so that you could send your app to my smartphone. I don't own a smartphone, so I was not able to complete that step. And I found no way to proceed without completing that step.

Expected results:

Make sure that your login process works for people who don't own smartphones. You also might want to make it easier for well-meaning people, such as myself, to warn you about issues like this. I couldn't find any email address for sending such feedback, so I had to create a Bugzilla account and file this "bug report" as the only way I could come up with to raise the issue.

Comment 1

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

Thanks for reporting this. I've filed this as a result: https://github.com/mozilla/fxa/issues/3597

There seems to be missing a start browsing link from the bottom of the page so that you can easily skip the step.

Setting up a phone is NOT required. Note that this is only visible when signing up to Sync because Sync does not work as expected unless you setup two devices. (it takes 2 devices to Sync)

Comment 2

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We've fixed it in https://github.com/mozilla/fxa/issues/3597 which will go live in mid-January.

Comment 3

[Alice Wyman]

(In reply to Alex Davis [:adavis] [PM FxA+Sync] from comment #1)

Sync does not work as expected unless you setup two devices. (it takes 2 devices to Sync)

For the record, Sync also works on one device (e.g., a desktop computer) with two Firefox profiles. Related discussion:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-firefox-sync/discuss/8231#post-18455

Comment 4

[Alex Davis [:adavis]]

(In reply to Alice Wyman from comment #3)

For the record, Sync also works on one device (e.g., a desktop computer) with two Firefox profiles. Related discussion:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-firefox-sync/discuss/8231#post-18455

Correct.
However, at this time, 99.9....% of FxA users don't run multiple profiles on one device. Our flows are designed for the majority of users.

We've fixed it in https://github.com/mozilla/fxa/issues/3597 which will go live in mid-January.

UX is also looking at improving this experience more generally but the current patch is a good quick fix until then.

Comment 5

[Alice Wyman]

Attachment: Fx71AcountMenu-signout-signin-MobilePhonePrompt.png

Firefox accounts are no longer just for syncing (see bug 1570565). The issue here is that signing into a Firefox account asks for a mobile phone number and people assume that a smartphone is needed to complete the sign-in process. I hope this gets resolved soon.