993199 - packaged webapp hangs on firstrun

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Web Apps (PWAs), defect, P2)

Description

[Franco (nextime) Lanza]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1825.4 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

open fennec nightly or firefox-beta on android arm ( i'm testing on cyanogenmod 12, android 4.4 on a galaxy s4 ) and go to http://www.unixmedia.net/webapp/
It will execute an installPackage() js script that will install the packaged app from 
http://www.unixmedia.net/webapp/package.zip using the mini-manifest at http://www.unixmedia.net/webapp/package.manifest by build the synthetic apk package and install it.

Open the application menu in android, and launch the "MySampleAppApk" application.


Actual results:

On firefox-beta, it hangs on the splashscreen

On fennec it starts, after the splashscreen i can see only a white page and nothing more, no html is shown, not javascript is executed

Apparently nothing relevant on adb logcat. 


Expected results:

after the splashscreen i should view the html of the index.html page from my package.zip app, where it should just show an "hello world" like text, and a javascript alert('pippo'); should be executed.

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

I see this too.  It isn't yet clear to me whether it's an issue with the app packaging or the runtime, (although a packaging issue still shouldn't cause the runtime to install the app and then hang).

When I try to install the app on desktop using the latest Nightly build, I see a MANIFEST_MISMATCH error in the Browser Console, probably because the mini-manifest and manifest differ on the "version" field (the mini-manifest has the field, but the manifest does not), and the "name, version, developer, and locales fields in your app manifest must be exactly the same as in your mini-manifest" <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Marketplace/Publishing/Packaged_apps#Mini-manifest_fields>.

That same doc notes: "Many values in the mini-manifest (package.manifest) and the manifest (manifest.webapp) need to be the same, otherwise installation will fail. The safest way is to copy the manifest to the mini-manifest and just add the package_path."

(I'm not sure if that's actually the cause of the problem here, but it's worth fixing in any case!)

Comment 2

[Franco (nextime) Lanza]

Ok, i can confirm that using the same manifest both as mini-manifest and manifest.webapp works on nightly ( it doesn't work on -beta, but latest nigtly 2014-04-10 works great )

Thanks for the workaround suggestion

Comment 3

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Myk, can you re-summarize this bug?

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to Aaron Train [:aaronmt] from comment #3)
> Myk, can you re-summarize this bug?

Yup, here's a simple resummarization!


But this was actually an issue with the app itself, as its manifest and minifest differed incompatibly, per comment 1.

In comment 2, Franco reports that the app worked for him on Nightly after he fixed the manifest/minifest mismatch, although it still didn't work on Beta.  Then this morning I confirmed that the app works for me on Beta too (perhaps because of another bug fix we landed on Beta since last week).  So I'm marking this WORKSFORME.


There are two related issues, however:

* If the manifest and minifest differ incompatibly, and the app thus can't be installed into DOMApplicationRegistry, we should do something better than simply hanging on launch.  Filed as bug 996068.

* If the manifest and minifest differ in ways that are not allowed, the APK Factory service should fail with an error instead of creating the APK.  Filed as bug 996072.

Comment 5

[Daniel Szabo]

We are still experiencing this "white screen" regularly and inconsistently.
On an Android device (Nexus 7, Android 4.4.2), after installing the webapp (either from our site or from the marketplace) the webapp may hang or not on the first launch. Usually, after kicking out both the webapp and the main Firefox process the webapp will launch. However, this time (using Firefox 31) the webapp wouldn't launch ever, it would just hang and display a white screen. After uninstalling the webapp (from Android), then reinstalling it again (from Firefox using our site's manifest) helped: no white screen.
- This white screen can't be caused by mismatched manifests, because this happens when installing from the marketplace too.
- Some of our marketplace submissions get rejected due to this white screen, some not. Substantially, all of our submission packages are the same, the only differences are icons and the target url.
- The same packages work on Firefox OS all the time.
- We didn't see this white screen bug before the change to the synthetic apk's.
- While the white screen is displayed pressing back then returning to the webapp "about://null" will be displayed in a mini url bar at the top of the page.