Upcoming migration to Mozilla Central

[moz-mobile-admin]

📢 Hi everyone,

Today, we are announcing the next step of our monorepo migration. On March 18th, the Fenix, Focus and Android Components projects will move into the mozilla-central repository. This will make it easier and faster to build, test and release our Android apps. Firefox for Android 126 will be the first version hosted in the same repository as GeckoView. Firefox for Android 124 and 125 will continue to be updated and shipped from GitHub as before.

Last year, we announced the first step of our migration to a unified monorepo, consolidating the Fenix, Focus and Android Components projects into a single new Firefox-Android repository. Those changes have already proven successful, and we are now confident that this second step is necessary.

What doesn’t change

All the issues related to Fenix, Focus, Android Components, as well as GeckoView, will remain on Bugzilla.

Fenix, Focus and Android Components will stay on the same release cadence, we'll continue to maintain and publish components and all functionality as usual, and our artifact, package and application IDs will also stay the same.

Why we are going to make changes

Having our Android code and the Gecko/GeckoView code in the same repository will bring us great improvements in various aspects, from developing to shipping, including CI, tooling and testing. Any change in GeckoView will be directly accessible from the code of the above-mentioned projects, and it will be a lot easier to automatically and more frequently test on our Android browsers, improving the reliability of our development processes.

What changes

On March 18th, 2024, all commits in the Github repository firefox-android are going to be migrated to mozilla-central. Contributing to Firefox for Android will be similar to Firefox Desktop: the same tools and the same process will be used. You can get familiar with them starting today. We provided some additional details in the FAQ.

As we prepare for this change, we want to thank you all for your help and support; your work has been critical to getting Fenix, Focus, and Android Components this far. We're grateful for your contributions, and believe these changes will make it easier to continue contributing to these projects. We will reach out individually on all open Pull Requests to discuss next steps, after the migration is done.

If you haven’t already contributed to GeckoView, Gecko and/or Firefox Desktop, you can get started following the already existing documentation. We encourage you to ask all your questions on Matrix. You can find us on Matrix in the following channels:
#fenix:mozilla.org
#focus-android:mozilla.org
#android-components:mozilla.org
#geckoview:mozilla.org

Thank you!