Intent to Desupport: Fennec Automated Updates (when Sideload Installed)

[Justin Wood]

Hello,

I am intending to stop offering Fennec updates when Fennec itself is
installed manually instead of via the Google Play store.

More details are at https://github.com/mozilla-releng/releng-rfcs/pull/13
or in rendered form at
https://github.com/Callek/releng-rfcs/blob/no_fennec_balrog/rfcs/0013-disable-fennec-balrog.md

Please contain (most) comments to the markdown on github.

I intend to implement this on autoland/central as of Feb 5, 2019 and allow
it to ride the trains to release.

Thank You,
~Justin Wood (Callek)
Release Engineer

[Justin Wood]

To follow up here, this is now landed on autoland, once this merges Fennec
Nightly will no longer find new updates when it was installed outside of
Google Play.

See linked document from thread for further insight.

~Justin Wood (Callek)

[Jeff Gilbert]

Did we figure out how to tell users they're not going to get updates
anymore? I don't see a resolution in that PR.

This used to be the only way to get Nightly, so I'd expect long time
users to be surprised. I only stopped using the downloaded APK last
year, I think.

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[Justin Wood]

There is not any in product support for Whats New Pages, or any sort of
Details urls, which we can set from Balrog for Desktop.

So I think we're left with outreach for these cases. Generally speaking
Nightly users are a substantially small subset of our users, and the uptake
counts on Nightly have been substantially low as well (that is uptake for
users who get Balrog queries) -- I think the fact that approximately half
of queries even checked balrog *once* using the current trunk version in
the timeframe [out of all queries] is pretty telling, and coupled with the
idea that this is Nightly and not Release/Beta I'm less concerned.

I haven't heard of a reason to hold out on this from any of the product
owners for this reason, and can revert the code if there is a need for
product support of such a thing, in which case I can advise on the balrog
side, but would need a few coordinated efforts to do (Some
website/translation work for the notice, some product work to support the
new param and to cause it to notify users in some way, etc)

I personally feel the effort is better spent on improving tooling going
forward, and informing via a SUMO article if enough people ask about it and
via commentary in bugs. (I also created a FAQ on the RFC for how to move
forward if you did sideload, to try and mitigate the problems this could
cause).

I'm open to other ways that I can facilitate user notification though.

~Justin Wood (Callek)