I found this bug in the context of https://codereview.chromium.org/2725813004/

Thanks for the report. This are all known issues because of the mandate from the privacy team that we wipe all of this data on clearing browsing data.

I actually feel like opening in a Chrome tab is the right thing to do here. Feels a bit sad though. +cc owencm for thoughts.

It makes sense that we would want to clear everything given the icon may have been removed from the home screen.

Now we have WebAPKs it seems to me that keeping these resources makes sense if the user still has the WebAPK installed.

I will start a thread with privacy to ask for guidance given the situation has changed somewhat from the past.

If the icon still is on the homescreen though, we'll have the icon and bits of metadata in there that we can use. We might be able to mitigate this problem somewhat.

Dominick: It would be nice if we could use the app icon from the meta data. Doing this also reduces code complexity 🙌

Given we can now tell exactly when a WebAPK is uninstalled, Privacy guidance is to not clear resources for installed WebAPKs, which sounds to me like it'll solve this UX problem?

owencm: This bug is about webapps not WebAPKs. I am very sorry for the confusion

For the sake of clarity, the WebAPK's splash screen is unaffected by what resources are cached in Chrome because WebAPKs extract all of the data needed for the splash screen from the WebAPK itself

I think the direction we're moving in is to have WebAPKs use splashscreens, launch fullscreen etc, and all non-webAPKs just launch tabs in Chrome without a splashscreen etc. It sounds to me like this issue simply goes away in that future world.

owencm: I agree. It would be nice if we can get rid of the old fullscreen webapps

Fixed by crrev.com/2725813004

Current behavior: after clearing Chrome's data from the beginning of time, web app still opens as full screen activity.

Hurray! 🙌

Thanks Felix!