"Cannot retrieve Tweet at this time" when clicking tweets

[rock3r]

When clicking a tweet in the Social screen, I get this error from the Twitter app:

I am currently investigating what the issue is. Logs don't show anything of interest at a first glance. Moto G, Android 4.4.4.

[alsutton]

This looks like the toast from the Twitter app when it hasn't got a network connection. I've tested the app on Lollipop and 4.4.4, neither of which seem to show the problem.

[rock3r]

It is indeed a toast from the twitter app. I am still reproducing it with the Google Play build; I want to check how the intent is prepared as that might be the issue.

[alsutton]

It's an issue with the twitter app's handling of the intent. The Intent is a ACTION_VIEW for a twitter.com URL, unfortunately the Twitter app takes these on and then toasts & fails if it can't get the tweet.

It's not bug, and the behaviour isn't unexpected, so I'm going to switch this to an enhancement and we can revisit it at some point.

[rock3r]

Ok, but this is still broken from a user's point of view.

[alsutton]

I disagree. The user is informed they can't see the tweet, and that trying later may resolve the issue.

It may not be the design choice you'd make, but that doesn't mean it's broken ;)

[rock3r]

Well, the user goal here is clearly "I want to see the details of this tweet and maybe act on it", and this is not possible. So yeah, to me that's the definition of a broken feature. Not discussing priorities or anything, man, just saying that as a user, this is broken for me. And I'm only insisting cos I'd like to fix it 👅

[alsutton]

Interesting view, and if it's an itch you want to scratch then go for it, but, to me, keeping the responsibility for showing tweet details in twitters app and using an Intent to access it is the "Android" way of doing things, the downside of it is that the design choices they make in terms of communicating a failure may not be the same design choices we'd make in the app.

[rock3r]

Again, not arguing the use of Intents nor the way Twitter shows errors (not my business). I don't want to handle the tweet details myself either. My only goal here is trying to see if there is a way we can avoid having the twitter app showing an error message (I don't care how they show it, but that whatever we and them are doing here results in an error message). That's it. I'll try seeing if I can obtain the same behaviour in a debug build and see if I can work around it -- it used to work in last year's app, so there probably is a way to get it to work again.

[alsutton]

As I said before, if you want to scratch the itch, go for it. I just want to make sure you don't submit a PR which tries to replicate the behaviour of the Twitter app which would be rejected.

[alsutton]

Damn them buttons are close together :S

[rock3r]

Nope, that's definitely not what I want to do. I just want to see if I can get the existing code to satisfy the user goal it's supposed to address. Nothing more.

[rock3r]

Ehehe I know, the close button should be on the other side, just in case