Login autofill doesn't work right on username/password login screen, on Android

[gnprice]

We have a couple of reports of the password field and username/email field not working correctly with password managers on Android. Specifically here and here.

The symptoms are seen on at least the Firefox for Android password manager, and Bitwarden.

There seem to be two potentially separate issues:

• If the user's interaction with the password manager involves going to another app and back, then nothing autofills.

  Sometimes this has the effect that it doesn't work the first time, but if the user tries again then it does work (because the switching to the other app and back is no longer required).

  This seems to be this issue in the Flutter tracker:
  [Android] Autofill from saved credentials doesn't work flutter/flutter#137760
  That issue has a reported workaround which looks fairly reasonable, so we should probably try that workaround.

• Even when the app doesn't leave the foreground, only the password field gets filled, and not the username/email field. (At least when the password field is the one that was focused when invoking the password manager.)

  If the workaround for the first issue doesn't also fix this one, then we'll file a separate issue for this part. Possibly it'll mean there's something different we should be doing with the AutofillGroup widget and its friends.

[deepraj02]

hey interested to work on this issue!! can I be assigned?

[gnprice]

@deepraj02 Please take a look at our guide here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-flutter?tab=readme-ov-file#picking-an-issue-to-work-on

[gnprice]

About the first of the two potentially-separate issues above, I noted:

• […] This seems to be this issue in the Flutter tracker:
  [Android] Autofill from saved credentials doesn't work flutter/flutter#137760

Hmm, well, that Flutter issue is now closed as fixed. The fix apparently came (see flutter/flutter#137760 (comment) ) as flutter/flutter@d35c08e … aka commit 3.19.0-14.0.pre~16, which was included in the Flutter update we took in 3a9a7af, which was included in our v0.0.11.

Ah, I guess the first of the two reports mentioned above was from 2023-05. At that time that upstream bug was live in Flutter main (though only recently so, and I haven't tracked down to confirm we'd taken that update), so it could have contributed then.

… And although the second report came the day after we released v0.0.11, on rereading I see it doesn't actually mention what version it was seen on. So it's possible that it was from v0.0.10. (Given Play Store review timelines, v0.0.10 was probably the latest version available there as of a few hours before the report, and possibly even at the time of the report.)

@andersk @andrewaylett, I'm curious what happens if you try to reproduce this issue now, on our current beta release v0.0.15. I'm hoping that at least the first of the symptoms mentioned above is resolved, and possibly the second as well.

[gnprice]

Anders reports that with the Firefox password manager the issue is still present in v0.0.15:

Yeah. The password manager never comes up.

So something else is going on besides that upstream issue flutter/flutter#137760. The next step is probably for us to try to make a reduced test case and file a new bug upstream.