Hello Android, Hello Impostors?

I've received requests for an Android version of the Wingman Jr. addon for a bit now, but I haven't jumped in yet. Why not?

While I've briefly tested the addon for mobile in the past and I've seen that it generally worked, every time you submit to the addons portal it requires to say you tested it specifically for Android if you say it supported it. Testing for mobile does not seem too bad but with the already limited bandwidth I don't want mobile support to hold up normal releases. Additionally, if reviewers have to approve for both platforms it may hold up approvals as well.

In addition to Firefox users, however, it appears that Wingman Jr.'s lack of mobile support has also caught the attention of others. While the code for this addon is strongly open source and I encourage you to use it, there seem to be at least two copycat addons that I suspect of acting in bad faith:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wingman-jr-premium/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wingman-jr-master-pro/

I believe these to be suspect based on their shady descriptions, seemingly incorrect licensing, and strange home site links. I do not know if these are privacy-honoring or if they funnel data.As far as I can tell, they seem to be capitalizing on providing Android support because the main addon does not.

So - I think it is time to make a legitimate option for Android!

What's the strategy going to be?

1. Clean up the main addon a bit. In particular - based on the fact that a) I believe no one is really using the Cloudflare blocking feature any more and that b) browsing domains are sent to Cloudflare if you opt into that feature and c) in conjunction with a new data collection reporting policy (which is good!), my plan is just to remove the feature entirely. Then I do not need to report any data collection, which will keep things simple and likely make approvals go faster. 
2. Create a new addon with a new ID that is Android only. I will not necessarily update this as often, but the idea would be to keep feature parity based on the version number so if e.g. you use desktop 3.7.0 version you could expect roughly the same set of features on Android for 3.7.0 but desktop might get more in-between releases. 

Based on past experiences, I don't anticipate that Android support will be too hard so I don't expect too long of a timeline, but if there's one thing I know about development - particularly development on a new platform - it's that there are always surprises. So stay tuned to the blog and I'll post as progress continues!