[What's New] Fennec Android Engineering

Hi All

I want to update the recent changes at Firefox for Android Engineering side :

Done

1. Leanplum push notification: This will allow us to interact with users when they are not running our app. The registration happens after switchboard init. Handling push is in GcmMessageListenerService (Shared with Sync).  

Photon is our brand new visual redesign for enhancing perceived performance. You should easy see the UI change and feel Fennec has been faster. But there are some follow-up issues we might need to take care about:

1. There are some color codes use different alpha values(different transparency) to simulate different states(pressed, enabled, disabled, etc). We should consider using different colors, instead of changing alpha value to reduce overdraw issues.

2. Because of the project descoping, we don't have enough resources to write Robocop tests instead highly depend on SoftVision's manual tests. To keep engineers/contributors having faith refactoring without afraid of causing regression, we should supplement related UI tests ASAP.

In Progress:

1. Limit Intent Filter: Adopt the same scheme for BrowserApp and LauncherActiivty.

2. Leanplum Deep Link security: Add User Id for each Leanplum Deep Links 

3. Custom Tab front end support: Mainly working on Context Menu

4. PWA front end support: Page Action when the page has proper manifest

Overall Priority

Product Managers (Joe and Andreas) have agreed on engineering priority like below. We'll put resource according to the list and add some engineering work in the middle if required.(e.g.Gradle build support) :

1. Mobile Photon (including Onboarding / Tablet / RTL support) (57)
2. Activity Stream (57) - (ownership on Activity Team)
3. Web Extensions (57) - (ownership on Add-ons Team)
4. LeanPlum (Push notification) (57/58)
5. PWA using GeckoView (57/58)
6. Custom Tabs using GeckoView (57/58)
7. Gradle build system (58/59)
8. Android O updates & support (dependency on Gradle build / new SDK)
9. Front-end refactoring planning for GeckoView
10. Work with marketing on ad blocker experiment in Taiwan
11. LeanPlum Banners
12. LeanPlum Onboarding
13. LeanPlum more triggers / events
14. Bookmark management (dependency on Sync team)
15. DLC on Android (w/ l10n team) (e.g., 1353334)