Android support?

[albell]

Hi guys,

So, I was psyched to get the EFF email about the PB 2.0 release. But, I've got a Android phone. I've visited the PB install page in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, and PB doesn't seem to be supported in any Android browser. W...... T....... F........ Am I missing something?

I love EFF. I want to see this project to succeed, beyond all of our wildest imaginations. But I have to scratch my head at the allocation of resources here. Mobile usage is approaching double that of desktop. We'll cross that line soon if we haven't already:

http://marketingland.com/digital-growth-now-coming-mobile-usage-comscore-171505

Is developing for desktop just easier? Why was a desktop release developed and released first? Mobile first, please!

I will donate hard cash towards a crowdfunding campaign for an Android release that has defined thresholds and deliverable dates. I'm sure I'm not alone. Tell me where to go.

[pde]

One way you can try Privacy Badger on Android is via the WARP browser which includes a port of Privacy Badger 1.x (we'll also work with Qualcomm to get that up to 2.x)

[ccoenen]

related to EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox-legacy#271 which is marked "wontfix", but apparently just because it's the legacy repository. :-) So there's hope!

[jawz101]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/privacy-badger17/

It's right there

[jawz101]

... Note it was only made available on Android just a week ago. There's no user interface so I can't really tell if it's doing anything. The only thing I notice is on a rooted phone is this file

file:///data/data/org.mozilla.firefox/files/mozilla/(profile name).default/browser-extension-data/jid1-MnnxcxisBPnSXQ%40jetpack/storage.js

But the file doesn't look like it's logging anything as the desktop version does. It just has this after a few days of browsing. On the desktop this would be full of logged sites:

{"snitch_map":{},"action_map":{},"cookieblock_list":{},"supercookie_domains":{},"dnt_hashes":{},"settings_map":{}}

[albell]

@jawz101 thanks. So it's... totally busted?

When I visit the project home page in Firefox 51 for Android this is what I see:

This just after your big launch announcement. There's.... a lot of opportunity being left on the table here. Negative first impressions can be hard to reverse. Does this project have full-time maintainers? If not, how can users like myself help fund the hiring of them? Privacy can be a business, too, just like advertising.

[albell]

P.S. I just downloaded WARP. It's cool niche product for the determined user, but the design/marketing is painfully amateur. It's hard to see this becoming a mainstream product with a global impact. I'd love to see a clearer path towards mass adoption on mobile.

[jawz101]

Well, I just go straight to the Firefox AMO page. Also, I don't even know if Firefox for Android is indeed e10s yet. When I go to about:support it still says multiprocess is disabled by add-ons. Now I think half of the problem is Mozilla still hasn't rolled e10s out to the mobile Firefox.

[cooperq]

Hi all,
Lead developer here. The big blocker with android support is that mobile firefox still doesn't support web extensions. So if you want to see privacy badger on android go let mozilla know!

[jawz101]

@cooperq check my post above. I can actually find Privacy Badger on the AMO mobile site while on my Android phone, install it, just doesn't do anything

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/privacy-badger17/

[albell]

@cooperq Thanks for the response. I'm new to WebExtensions, but I'm looking at:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-firefox-48/

which says:

With the release of Firefox 48 we are announcing Android support for WebExtensions. WebExtensions add-ons can now be installed and run on Android, just like any other add-on. However, because Firefox for Android makes use of a native user interface, anything that involves user interface interaction is currently unsupported (similar to existing extensions on Android).

So is the lack of UI support the holdup? Is there a way to end-run around this, so that some version of PB2 can run on Fennec for the year 2017, before full support arrives?