Thanks Jan! Yes.... It seems that for anyone targetting the higher Android OS level they, Google, turn off the ability for your app to have permission to access files stored by other apps... unless you request special review by Google for your app to retain the permission to access such files. Did ya'll get that memo?
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9956427 Our user's main use of Firefox on Android has been to browse html education curriculum on another app's internal files storage located on the extSD of the students phone. In fact FireFox is the only browser I have found that can freely surf from one local html to another in local curriculum repository. Chrome sand boxes and even media links are broken. By FireFox not petitioning Google for "All files Access" permission FireFox users will have to say goodbye to a very important feature of FireFox. Local browsing. We rolled out to production to children all across the world on, World Literacy Day. If you guys had not put out a release after Aug 8th we would have had no problem because the old version of Android Firefox is/was not restricted to all files access. In reading Google's rules in the link above it looks like Google will grant exceptions. Maybe Firefox should make your case for an exception? Like Filemanagers require an exception to access other apps data... FF requires access as well. Your users are my users, and they need to browse student curriculum stored locally on the phone in developing countries where access to cloud education is not available. They probably are going to push back because it runs contrary to their business advertising cloud model. What if 50 million teachers started making their own lessons using an html editor and handed out their year of curriculum on SD card? That would be one point five billion lost advertising customers for Google. But the reality is that there are presently 1.5 Billion school children who are sitting at home... out of school. They do not have access to cloud education because of very poor internet infrastructure. We were going to be serving them a means beginning on World Literacy Day to learn to read their mother tongue, local business and English languages all with local hand sign assist to include the Deaf. We are using the Resilio p2p distribution app network to distribute the 1.8GB media rich curriculums directly to their phone extSD. This circumvents the poor internet issue. Resilio has loaned the His Hands Reader mother tongue literacy movement free use of their p2p distribution assets. It goes beyond the cloud edge. I can think of a few stop gap solutions to remedy our impass imposed by Google's data access restriction. The first one I have already implemented and is live on Google Play now. 1) Have the user turn off their auto app update setting in Google Play... And we install the old working version of FF from apkpur.com 2) Mozilla create an app called Legacy Firefox in which you target a lower version of Android that ducks the permission issue. None of our potential 1.5 billion users in developing countries have late model phones ..so no issue. This option may even help you stave off the Firestorm that I see brewing in your comments with your new release... till you have time to fix things. 3) Mozilla petition Google for permission to access files across the device. Your basis for petition is our 1.5 billion children being served by the His Hands Reader We were finally able to release a few days after World Literacy Day. Also, September is Deaf Awareness month. Whether Google's motto is "Don't be evil." Or "Do the right thing"... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil Either one fits here with helping smooth out the files permissions issue they have imposed so the children in the most under served regions in the world can have access to education during this pandemic. Would you, Firefox push back on cloud dominance, and give back your users freedom to browse their own data? Thanks! Bob Achgill ________________________________ From: Jan Henning <jh+mobile-firefox-...@buttercookie.de> Sent: Wednesday, September 9, 2020 2:37 AM To: Michael Comella <mcome...@mozilla.com> Cc: Bob Achgill <bobachg...@hotmail.com>; mobile-firefox-dev@mozilla.org <mobile-firefox-dev@mozilla.org> Subject: Re: Intent broken If "local URL" / "local html web" means files stored on the device itself, the more pressing problem will be that Fenix currently doesn't support opening local files at all<https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/1327>. Depending on which Android OS version you're talking about, on more recent Android versions you might also run into problems due to Google's attempts of deprecating direct file system access and the problem that their official replacement method is absolutely and totally unsuitable<https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/150076643> for things like HTML files which have other resources (images, style sheets, scripts, other HTML files) associated with them. Jan Am 09.09.2020 03:05, schrieb Michael Comella: Hi Bob, I believe that: intent.component = ComponentName("org.mozilla.firefox", "org.mozilla.firefox.App") Should change to: intent.component = ComponentName("org.mozilla.firefox", "org.mozilla.fenix.IntentReceiverActivity") Though I haven't tested this locally. We changed which activity receives VIEW intents which I believe is the cause of this change. There may also be a less fragile way of sending intents to Firefox: rather than saying, "Have this Activity (which can be renamed) in Firefox open this VIEW intent", it'd be preferable to remove the Activity: "Have Firefox open this VIEW intent". Perhaps this can be done with `intent.package`<https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent#setPackage(java.lang.String)> instead of `intent.component`. We are considering removing IntentReceiverActivity for performance reasons so heads up that that may become a breaking change for you in the future if you leave the code the same. As you've probably seen, we did a major rewrite of Firefox that was recently released so it might be good to check that other functionality is also working as expected – sorry for any inconvenience it has caused. - Mike (:mcomella) On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 7:59 PM Bob Achgill <bobachg...@hotmail.com<mailto:bobachg...@hotmail.com>> wrote: I need some advice. I used to be able to start up FireFox Android from my Android code by passing an intent with local URL like in the code below... then could surf the local html web within Firefox. But as of sometime in August new updates to Firefox in Google Play this capability has broken. Version 68.11.0 worked OK but a version soon after that something changed in Firefox. With the later releases the startActivity(intent) will start up Firefox but not with the passed local url. Is there something I'm missing that changed? Here is my code... val url = resilioPath + "HHRPickALanguage.html" val intent = Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse(url)) intent.component = ComponentName("org.mozilla.firefox", "org.mozilla.firefox.App") this.startActivity(intent) What can I do to get it working again? It is a pain to have to ask the user to turn off Google Play Auto app Update and install an old version of Firefox. My users are children in developing countries using my app to learn to read their mother tongue while they cannot go to school due to the Covid-19. The change in Firefox Android could not have come at a worse time. Thanks! Bob Achgill www.HisHandsReader.org<http://www.HisHandsReader.org> _______________________________________________ mobile-firefox-dev mailing list mobile-firefox-dev@mozilla.org<mailto:mobile-firefox-dev@mozilla.org> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mobile-firefox-dev _______________________________________________ mobile-firefox-dev mailing list mobile-firefox-dev@mozilla.org<mailto:mobile-firefox-dev@mozilla.org> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mobile-firefox-dev
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