1816283 - Android Firefox loses all user data, including bookmarks, passwords, tabs when upgraded

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Fenix :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[D Tyler]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/107.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Firefox for Android

Steps to reproduce:

Using a Galaxy S8 running Android 9:

1. Upgrade to Firefox 109.2.0 (Build #2015930059) using the Play Store
2. open the App,

Actual results:

All of my user data was gone. No tabs, bookmarks, saved passwords or other settings were available.

Expected results:

All user data should have been preserved.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Bookmarks & History' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[D Tyler]

User Agent Might be: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 9; Mobile; rv:109.0) Gecko/109.0 Firefox/109

The BOT is wrong - this is an Upgrade issue and affects all user data, not just bookmarks.

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:cpeterson, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 4

[D Tyler]

This issue is HIGH severity because it causes the loss of all user data, including critical data like logins, passwords as well as bookmarks and all other data. Also, this is a known bug affecting all users who upgrade Firefox that is more than a few months old. Users do not always update continuously for many reasons, including new bugs, loss of function and general instability associated with new versions of Firefox. Waiting a few months to a year seems to be the best approach.

Comment 5

[Matt Tighe [:matt-tighe]]

This does seem severe if it's impacting other users. Checking in with the SUMO team

Comment 6

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Resolving this bug as incomplete because we have no steps to reproduce and, at this time, we won't be able to debug the state of the reporter's device when they experienced the bug.

Comment 7

[D Tyler]

Please do not close this bug - there is a very specific sequence to reproduce the failure listsed above and reproduced here in case you are unable to see the prior comments:
Steps to reproduce:
Using a Galaxy S8 running Android 9:
Upgrade to Firefox 109.2.0 (Build #2015930059) using the Play Store
open the App,
Actual results:
All of my user data was gone. No tabs, bookmarks, saved passwords or other settings were available.
Expected results:
All user data should have been preserved.

However, this problem is very easy to understand. Essentially the code that is responsible for migrating prior versions of user data is broken/absent. In all well written (IMHO) software, if an upgrade is requested that is unable to understand and seamlessly migrate user metadata, such as bookmarks, etc, then before the upgrade is allowed to proceed (and thus destroy the user data), the user should be warned repeatedly that ALL DATA WILL BE LOST.

Of course, it would be best if migration code was included for much older versions of user metadata and thus upgrades would work even if the user had not upgraded Firefox for a very long time. The very least Firefox should do is NOT silently destroy all user data.

Comment 8

[jackyzy823]

Cross-post some discussion in the cloned bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1890662#c1
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1890662#c2

User data are cleaned up when upgrading from old Fennec (version <=68) to the Fenix (version >=100) , due to migration code (for fennec -> fenix) was removed in version 100.

Related issue:
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/22489
[2] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/23651