How to file a good Android Sync bug

This is a copy of an old document which needs more love - please update it if you can!

So you’ve seen some behavior that looks like a bug — perhaps a crash, perhaps data being corrupted, perhaps some performance impact or a sync never finishing.

The first thing we need is a log from the device. There’s no about:sync-log any more, so you’ll need to fetch the logs from the device via USB or using an Android application.

If you have an Android SDK and a USB cable, you can run

   adb logcat -v time | grep -i  -E "(sync15|sync_manager|FirefoxAccount)"

and capture logs during the event that reproduces the bug. There will be a lot of output.

Unfortunately it's difficult to get access to the logs in any other way (ie, without a rooted phone or similar).

Once you have the log in a file, you can attach it to a new Android Sync bug in Bugzilla. Please take the time to write:

• An accurate summary of your issue. “Sync adds bookmarks from desktop Bookmarks Toolbar, but local changes do not appear on desktop” is way more useful than “Sync doesn’t work”.

• A description that explains what you see, what you expect to see, and any other pertinent information. Let us know which other devices you have connected to your Sync account: “Firefox 23 on Mac, Firefox 24 on Windows 7”.

• Steps to reproduce. If you can start with a clean profile everywhere, and take a reproducible sequence of actions to cause a bug to manifest, we will be really grateful, and the bug is much more likely to be fixed than one we have to guess at.

• A description of your device and the version of Firefox you’re using. Something like “Samsung Galaxy S3, Android 10, Firefox Nightly 201019” is enough. You can find out your Android version in the Android Settings application under "About Phone", and your Firefox for Android version in Firefox's Settings menu -> About Phone.

(Thanks to Richard Newman for the first version of this page!)