809700 - To prevent squatting, let's upload Nightly/Aurora to the Play Store (and then disable it)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

Blassey had a good idea the other day - let's upload Nightly/Aurora to the Play Store and then disable those products immediately to ensure that no future developers steal our ID.

Aki - any pitfalls I'm not thinking of before moving forward with this?

Comment 1

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

These have to be release-signed (or at least signed by a key that doesn't expire that we'll have access to the next time we want to modify these apks).

Other than that I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

Comment 2

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

do they need to be firefox apks?

Comment 3

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

Probably not, as long as they have the right app names.
I think the nightly key will actually work, as long as we believe the nightly key will stay safe as long as the release key.  So the easiest path would be to upload nightly builds of m-c and Aurora to the market.

Comment 4

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

As long as the APKs have the right Name and ID (like org.mozilla.firefox, but for Nightly/Aurora), they successfully upload and are disabled, I think we're good to go. Fire at will :)

Comment 5

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

Attachment: someone already uploaded fennec

Comment 6

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

I wouldn't be surprised if this were someone uploading a nightly to test something...

Comment 7

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

Aurora uploaded with fake screenshots and saved, but not published.

Comment 8

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

Resolved as much as can be.

Comment 9

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

I don't see Nightly in there

Comment 10

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

(In reply to Ben Hearsum [:bhearsum] from comment #9)
> I don't see Nightly in there

Comment 5 :( - I poked around and couldn't find who was using org.mozilla.fennec on the Play Store.

Comment 11

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

I'd guess either SplitReleaseTest or TestFennecXUL1 on the [e-mail] test account are to blame here.  I wish the market UI allowed for either downloading the apk or viewing the app name on the web page, without activating and publishing it and downloading through the market.

Comment 12

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

(In reply to Aki Sasaki [:aki] from comment #11)
> I'd guess either SplitReleaseTest or TestFennecXUL1 on the
> [e-mail] test account are to blame here.  I wish the market
> UI allowed for either downloading the apk or viewing the app name on the web
> page, without activating and publishing it and downloading through the
> market.

If we can find out who has the application uploaded to their account, we can transfer it to the Mozilla account at http://phandroid.com/2012/06/21/getting-acquired-how-to-transfer-ownership-of-your-android-app-or-game/.

It's not the SplitReleaseTest in our account, which has org.mozilla.fennec_blassey (see "APK files" tab and then More Info)

Comment 13

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

Aha, the apk files tab was useless in this regard in the current UI, but if you preview the new UI, it's there.

org.mozilla.fennec isn't any of the 4 uploaded products in [e-mail]; it's somewhere else.

Comment 14

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Possibly one of the files mbrubeck uploaded he uploaded some early nightly builds for the split apk testing.

Comment 15

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

1. Looking for a developer with org.mozilla.fennec uploaded to the Google Play store.
2. After a certain amount of time [?], go to Mozilla Legal.

Comment 16

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

The only app I have uploaded to my Google Play account is org.mozilla.fennec_mbrubeck.

Comment 17

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

Should we contact Google, or send this bug to Legal, or ?

Comment 18

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

(In reply to Aki Sasaki [:aki] from comment #17)
> Should we contact Google, or send this bug to Legal, or ?

We should probably get in touch with Google first, since there's a high probability that an engineer at Mozilla uploaded org.mozilla.fennec to the Store.

I sent

"We're interested in uploading Firefox Nightly (org.mozilla.fennec) to Google Play, to possibly enable in the near future. We're getting a message that org.mozilla.fennec is already taken when uploading the APK. We believe one of our developers over the last couple of years mistakenly uploaded a org.mozilla.fennec APK, and we'd like to take ownership again.

For proof that we've been using this package name for a very long time, please see https://nightly.mozilla.org/ and https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/

Please let us know what next steps we need to take to get org.mozilla.fennec back. Thanks!"

to https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/request.py?contact_type=publishing

Comment 19

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

"Thank you for your note. The package name, org.mozilla.fennec, was indeed published by a developer in November 2010. However this app appears to have violated your copyright and was suspended. Since Google Play does not support the deletion or re-use of package names you will need to utilize a different package name."

Well, at least nobody can squat on it! :( that we'd have to rename our package to upload to the store.