Is there a design?

In Chrome, we report UMA metrics to users who have given consent on official Chrome builds only.

Will AppShell use Chrome's consent? Is there a concept of official Chrome builds for AppShell?

How do you want these metrics to show up server-side? i.e. as part of the same platform's metrics?

Will they re-use the same client id as Chrome's reports? Or different ones? If you use the same client id, then it must be kept in sync with Chrome, cleared when user opts out, etc. If it's different, then now you're doubling the user counts in UMA (if every Chrome user also uses app shell) which is probably not what you want.

This probably needs a launch bug, with privacy review, etc.

Thanks for the thoughtful questions. Couple high-level notes: AppShell is only supported inside Google (specifically, by the GVC team). And AppShell runs separately from Chrome (it's essentially a replacement for Chrome as a Chrome App runner).

> Is there a design?

The root AppShell design is at go/app-shell-linux. I don't have a metrics-specific design.

> In Chrome, we report UMA metrics to users who have given consent on official Chrome builds only.
> Will AppShell use Chrome's consent?

No, AppShell and Chrome use entirely separate user-data directories. They don't interact with each other.

Users of official builds can indicate metrics consent by passing the --enable-reporting command-line flag, since there's no UI.

> Is there a concept of official Chrome builds for AppShell?

Yep, using the same gn args as Chrome builds. We only need to support metrics for official builds, if it helps.

> How do you want these metrics to show up server-side? i.e. as part of the same platform's metrics?

I'm not sure. This is worth additional discussion, maybe a meeting?

> Will they re-use the same client id as Chrome's reports? Or different ones? If you use the same client id, then it must be kept in sync with Chrome, cleared when user opts out, etc. If it's different, then now you're doubling the user counts in UMA (if every Chrome user also uses app shell) which is probably not what you want.

Ah, I see the confusion. AppShell is a separate, standalone program. And it's currently only planned for use on Linux GVC devices, where it will run *in lieu of* Chrome, not concurrently with it. So yes, it does (and should) have its own client ID.

> This probably needs a launch bug, with privacy review, etc.

Issue 749270 is the AppShell launch bug. It has Privacy=NA. Let me know if you still think we need a separate launch bug for metrics.

Thanks for the extra context. I think some of my questions had assumption that were not true (i.e. I assumed that AppShell is something that would run on Chrome user's machines - e.g. to host Chrome apps or whatever).

But given it's a different beast altogether, we have to discuss some more things. In particular, you probably want its metrics to be separate from Chrome desktop. This can be done in a number of ways - for example, defining a new platform (LINUX_APPSHELL) or a new product (similar to Android webview). The former would be much less effort for us to support than the latter. Sounds like a meeting would be a good start.