999916 - Offer Firefox Accounts to existing multi-device Firefox Sync desktop users

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

This is much like Bug 999911, but for multi-device users.

The big additional complexity here is:

1. We'd ideally like to not silently partition the user's devices (partitioning: where the user upgrades one device but doesn't upgrade them all), and thus doesn't realize they're not syncing.

2. We'd also ideally like to avoid the user having to laboriously sign out of Sync and sign in to FxA on each of their devices.


We can address (1) in two ways. We can either write into your old Sync account, or we can not.

If we don't, we can try to guess on another client that a transition from N to N-1 clients means that the user has upgraded to FxA, and offer on that device. So you'd upgrade on your desktop, it'd try its last-ditch client record deletion, and some time later your phone would say "hey, do you want to sign in with your Firefox Account?".

If we do, we can be more precise about our messaging: "I see you just upgraded 'Richard's Firefox on MacBook Air' to Firefox Accounts. Do you want to sign in here? You must sign in to keep syncing.".


If we choose the latter, we can address (2) fairly easily: instead of writing that simple sentinel, we write your FxA credentials; instead of showing that message, we automatically sign you in to FxA, falling back to a similar message on failure.

That part is Bug 956444 on Android, Bug 908465 on desktop. I'm going to mark those as dependencies for now. The meta bug for those is Bug 895518.

Comment 1

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

The current plan is to not differentiate between single and multi-device users, and everything in these bugs are covered elsewhere.

Comment 2

[James Bonacci [:jbonacci]]

OK.