719714 - Kindle Fire: Firefox Native can't support Sync on this device

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Tony Chung [:tchung]]

Attachment: screenshot 1

Installed Fennec Nightly 1-19-2012 build (which includes Sync), on the Fire and noticed 2 things:

1) firefox sync application does not get displayed or unpackaged anywhere in the Apps manager.  So only the nightly application is available  (see screenshot 1)
2) Kindle Fire doesnt seem to expose Sync settings in their UI.   There's no clear way to get to Accounts & Sync settings like normal Android devices. (see screenshot 2)

This means if we ever plan to upload Firefox 11+ to the Amazon Appstore to reach the Kindle Fire users, then we should know that the current implementation and packaging will not work with Firefox Sync on the device.   Also, any place we are advertising setting up sync (eg. About:home), we'll want to have a custom page for devices like the Fire that don't support Sync.  

Logcat of installation attached.

Repro:
1) install firefox nightly 1-19-2012 on Kindle Fire (via adb install)
2) verify no firefox sync app is shown in the Dashboard.  
3) Also verify there's no exposed way to get to 3rd party sync account settings

Expected:
- some way to expose Accounts and Settings so we can use Firefox Sync

Comment 1

[Tony Chung [:tchung]]

Attachment: screenshot 2

Comment 2

[Tony Chung [:tchung]]

Attachment: logcat of installation

Comment 3

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

The Fire appears to lack two things:

* The ability to add launcher icons (in our case multiple launcher icons for our top-level Activities, specified in our manifest, but I suspect this applies to things like "add to home page", too). This isn't deathly crucial, because we'll have in-app affordances for Sync.

* The ability to manage Accounts. A quick search revealed that no app I know of that requires such -- Facebook, Twitter, Gmail -- was installed on the phone or available in the App Store, and of course the Settings entry is missing.

This is the kicker. I don't know if this is a conscious decision (to extend battery life by avoiding background data usage?), but unless we're missing something, it's fatal for us.

Now I go to try again to find out for sure…

Comment 5

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Bug 721110 will try and hide the advertisement

Comment 6

[Tony Chung [:tchung]]

See my comments in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721110#c28.   This is working now on the 3-28-2012 nightly build.