809916 - Make WebSMS work on Android

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

It's unclear if we want to continue keeping the WebSMS stuff on Android, and perhaps fix bugs like 809459 (due to bug 775997), or instead remove all the relevant code. It's at least leaking (though on shutdown) and probably broken right now.

Doug was in favor of taking it out entirely:
<dougt> untested, no tests, default off per android manifest, no product requirement, no one maintaining it, extra code

Blassey would like it enabled but thinks the current Android Store permission model is a problem for it.

Mounir might be willing to work on it.

I don't think there's real agreement on what to do to proceed (or any resources available).

Comment 1

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

filter on [mass-p5]

Comment 2

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

> It's unclear if we want to continue keeping the WebSMS stuff on Android

2.5 years later, I wonder if Blassey would still like to keep this around.

Marcos, I see you've been involved in the spec--do you know if other vendors have expressed interest in this API?

Comment 3

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

Turns out we do. Android-M let's us do run time permission requests, so we want to enable WebSMS for Android-M only

Comment 4

[Marcos Caceres [:marcosc]]

> Marcos, I see you've been involved in the spec--do you know if other vendors have expressed interest in this API?

No, there is no interest in this API in its current form... people should use `sms:` scheme instead.

Comment 5

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Is there enough motivation to keep this around rather than removing it (Bug 1153560), given that we can expect a year or more before there's significant market penetration for M, and no interest in the API (Comment 4)?

If there is, is this motivation enough for an APK split for M so we don't suffer the pure APK bloat for 99.9% of our users?

If we're not intending a split, I'd strongly argue that we should kill it and not waste our time or the kilobytes. Installer size is way more important than exposing an API that nobody wants.

I seem to recall serious lint/findbugs errors in the SmsManager code, so I'd guess that there's a non-trivial amount of work to do before turning this on anywhere that we'd expect real use.

Comment 6

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to Marcos Caceres [:marcosc] from comment #4)
> > Marcos, I see you've been involved in the spec--do you know if other vendors have expressed interest in this API?
> 
> No, there is no interest in this API in its current form... people should
> use `sms:` scheme instead.

Based on this, I don't think we should attempt to ship the API. Removing the code is the better plan.

Comment 7

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 8

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.