mozilla-mobile

focus-android

Kotlin2017–2019

mozilla-mobile / focus-android · Archived

focus-android

⚠️ Firefox Focus (Android) moved to a new repository. It is now developed and maintained as part of: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android

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17Distinct people

21Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

2.1KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

⚠️ Firefox Focus (Android) moved to a new repository. It is now developed and maintained as part of: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month21 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-08-18 20:44:38 UTC to 2019-08-29 18:30:06 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
Aug 2017	2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	12	12
Sep 2017	2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
Oct 2017	2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Nov 2017	2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Dec 2017	2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jan 2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Feb 2018	2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 2018	2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 2018	2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 2018	2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Jun 2018	2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 2018	2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 2018	2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Sep 2018	2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
Oct 2018	2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Nov 2018	2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Dec 2018	2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jan 2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Feb 2019	2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 2019	2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 2019	2019-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 2019	2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jun 2019	2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Jul 2019	2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 2019	2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction

Firefox Focus for Android Browse like no one’s watching. The new Firefox Focus automatically blocks a wide range of online trackers — from the moment you launch it to the second you leave it. Easily erase your history, passwords and cookies, so you won’t get followed by things like unwanted ads. Firefox Focus provides automatic ad blocking and tracking protection on an easy-to-use private browser. Google Play: Firefox Focus (Global) Google Play: Firefox Klar (Germany, Austria & Switzerland) Download APKs Getting Involved We encourage you to participate in this open source project. We love Pull Requests, Bug Reports, ideas, (security) code reviews or any other kind of positive contribution. Before you attempt to make a contribution please read the Community Participation Guidelines. Guide to Contributing (New contributors start here!) View current Issues, view current Pull Requests, or file a security issue. Opt-in to our Mailing List firefox-focus-public@ to keep up to date. View the Wiki. Beginners! - Watch out for Issues with the "Good First Issue" label. These are easy bugs that have been left for first timers to have a go, get involved and make a positive contribution to the project! Build Instructions Clone or Download the repository: git clone https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android Import the project into Android Studio or build on the command line: ./gradlew clean app:assembleFocusDebug Make sure to select the correct build variant in Android Studio: focusArmDebug for ARM focusX86Debug for X86 focusAarch64Debug for ARM64 local.properties helpers You can speed up or enhance local development by setting a few helper flags available in local.properties which will be made easily available as gradle properties. Automatically sign release builds To sign your release builds with your debug key automatically, add the following to <proj-root>/local.properties: autosignReleaseWithDebugKey With this line, release build variants will automatically be signed with your debug key (like debug builds), allowing them to be built and installed directly through Android Studio or the command line. This is helpful when you're building release variants frequently, for example to test feature flags and or do performance analyses. Building debuggable release variants Nightly, Beta and Release variants are getting published to Google Play and therefore are not debuggable. To locally create debuggable builds of those variants, add the following to <proj-root>/local.properties: debuggable Auto-publication workflow for android-components and application-services If you're making changes to these projects and want to test them in Focus, auto-publication workflow is the fastest, most reliable way to do that. In local.properties, specify a relative path to your local android-components and/or application-services projects. E.g.: autoPublish.android-components.dir=../firefox-android/android-components autoPublish.application-services.dir=../application-services Note that the Android Components project was already migrated to the new firefox-android repository. Therefore, this auto publication workflow won't be neccessary for Android Components once Focus is integrated in the new repository as well. Once these flags are set, your Focus builds will include any local modifications present in these projects. See a demo of auto-publication workflow in action. Pre-push hooks To reduce review turn-around time, we'd like all pushes to run tests locally. We'd recommend you use our provided pre-push hook in quality/pre-push-recommended.sh. Using this hook will guarantee your hook gets updated as the repository changes. This hook tries to run as much as possible without taking too much time. To add it, run this command from the project root: ln -s ../../quality/pre-push-recommended.sh .git/hooks/pre-push To push without running the pre-push hook (e.g. doc updates): git push <remote> --no-verify Test Channel on Google PlayStore To get Focus Nightly on your device, follow these steps: Visit https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-focus-pre-release and join the Google Group After you have joined the group opt-in to receive Nightly builds, again with the same Google account: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.focus.nightly Download Firefox Focus (Nightly) from Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.focus.nightly Make sure you use the same Google Account for both steps. License This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/

Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

12 sources

482794793792894·Aug 20, 2017

Focus was initially intended for users who are concerned about privacy, but in no way short of helpless in actually trying to get it. The type of user that has trouble finding or even understanding Private Browsing in Firefox. (Focus does not actually protect privacy more than Firefox's Private Browsing mode either.) Launching a separate app on the other hand is a familiar concept and does also explain quite nicely that browsing history won't be saved, as it's normal that data does not get shared between apps, whereas Private Browsing is a separate concept that needs understanding. And this in effect had implications on the design. Not having tabs was a deliberate design choice, because this type of casual user does generally not understand those either. That it would get so much adoption in the tech world was very much unexpected. So, ta

Read the rest

bs are being worked on, Tor integration is coming, this sort of stuff. Tabs might take a little while still, though: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/issues/960

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

st3fan·Aug 19, 2017

Because that library is there does not mean that we are giving data to Google. It does not even mean that it is active or that it is sending anything. This is a very strange conclusion that you present. I feel you are just twisting and turning to come to an unfavourable outcome here. Even Google has decent data collection policies. They will not randomly make an application collect data without the developer opting in. We did not opt in. We are not including any sort of google analytics api key to enable anything. In any case I have filed https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/issues/1174

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

st3fan·Aug 19, 2017

It may end up in the APK but that does not mean it is actually used. This is the unfortunate side effect of pulling in dependencies with dependencies. I can assure you that Adjust does not talk to google analytics behind our backs. It may have that option, but we did not configure it to use that functionality. What would it talk to, we did not configure an API key. I will find out if we can remove this dependency to avoid confusion. Filed https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/issues/1174 (And for completeness, Adjust source code at https://github.com/adjust/android_sdk)

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

cyphar·Aug 19, 2017

It is on FDroid[1], and they provide official builds[2]. I really wish people would actually check stuff like this (that takes a few minutes) before spreading FUD. As an aside, I only use FDroid on my devices to install APKs (the only exception being Signal which now provides bare APKs[3]). [1]: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.klar/ [2]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/releases [3]: https://signal.org/android/apk/

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

cyphar·Aug 19, 2017

It's likely that's because it currently uses the built-in Android WebView (which may store its own pseudo-history). That is a problem, but I believe their plans to replace WebView with Gecko will likely solve this problem. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/issues/13

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

mintplant·Aug 19, 2017

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the Google SDK is only used to record whether the app was installed by way of an ad campaign Mozilla is running on Google. All other telemetry data goes directly to Mozilla servers, and contains things like "feature X was used"—not browsing data. Since it's all free software, you can check what events are actually sent here: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/blob/master/...

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

st3fan·Aug 19, 2017

Focus and Klar do not use the Google Play Store Analytics. Mozilla has their own Telemetry service. This documentation is a good start: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/wiki/Telemet... You have to understand how extremely strict Mozilla is with using third-party services for things like crash reporting and telemetry. It is extremely difficult to find services that meet our very high standard for privacy.

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

st3fan·Aug 19, 2017

Focus is an open source project with no secrets. It is easy to verify your claims by looking at the code. The telemetry is documented in detail at https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/wiki/Telemet... We also include Adjust in Focus (not in Klar) for attribution tracking - to understand where the install came from. (This is useful if you are spending money on campaigns and you would like to understand what campaigns are the most effective) If you have questions or suggestions, check the https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/blob/master/... for ways to reach the team.

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

_delirium·Aug 18, 2017

It's currently also true on Android, because Gecko doesn't yet provide a WebView style embeddable component, so Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView instead. There's a bug tracking work to migrate to Gecko though: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/issues/13 (see also the linked https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322573)

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

AaronMT·Aug 18, 2017

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/releases

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

feikname·Aug 18, 2017

It is already planned to be implemented into the Ebony milestone, which itself is planned to be released on October 12 of this year. This is the relevant issue on their GitHub repo: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/issues/66 edit: Please note that this is for the Android version only.

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android

piotrkubisa·Aug 18, 2017

> " Firefox Klar is a version of Firefox Focus for Germany, Austria and Switzerland with user activity tracking disabled by default." [1] > "For clients that have "send anonymous usage data" enabled Focus sends a "core" ping and an "event" ping to Mozilla's telemetry service. Sending telemetry can be disabled in the app's settings. Builds of "Focus for Android" have telemetry enabled by default ("opt-out") while builds of "Klar for Android" have telemetry disabled by default." [2] [1]: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.klar/ [2]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/wiki/Telemet...

In Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android