[Distance] - Unable to use current location once the site location access is denied

[lanitochka17]

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Issue found when executing PR #25990

Action Performed:

1. Go to staging.new.expensify.com
2. Go to + > Request money > Distance
3. Go to Start > Use current location
4. Allow location permission
5. Turn off location permission
6. Refresh the page
7. Click Use current location
8. Reset site permission
9. Refresh the page
10. Click Use current location
11. Click Allow

Expected Result:

Every time location access on browser is allowed, the app is able to use current location feature

Actual Result:

Once the location access is denied on the mobile browser, the app is unable to use current location feature when the location access is re-enabled

Workaround:

Unknown

Platforms:

Which of our officially supported platforms is this issue occurring on?

• Android / native
• Android / Chrome
• iOS / native
• iOS / Safari
• MacOS / Chrome / Safari
• MacOS / Desktop

Version Number: v1.3.61-1

Reproducible in staging?: Yes

Reproducible in production?: No

If this was caught during regression testing, add the test name, ID and link from TestRail:

Email or phone of affected tester (no customers):

Logs: https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/4856

Notes/Photos/Videos: Any additional supporting documentation

Bug6184890_Screen_Recording_20230901_175759_Chrome.mp4

Expensify/Expensify Issue URL:

Issue reported by: Applause - Internal team

Slack conversation:

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[OSBotify]

👋 Friendly reminder that deploy blockers are time-sensitive ⏱ issues! Check out the open StagingDeployCash deploy checklist to see the list of PRs included in this release, then work quickly to do one of the following:

1. Identify the pull request that introduced this issue and revert it.
2. Find someone who can quickly fix the issue.
3. Fix the issue yourself.

[melvin-bot]

Triggered auto assignment to @srikarparsi (Engineering), see https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/4319 for more details.

[pecanoro]

I was looking into another deploy blocker linked to this, but I encountered this problem as well. The current location is super buggy lol It also does not work if you delete the current address and try to use the current location.

[huzaifa-99]

I will be fixing this with a new PR (taking changes from #25990)

cc: @hayata-suenaga @narefyev91

[pecanoro]

Since the original PR was reverted, I am removing the deploy blocker label!

[huzaifa-99]

Update: Once the location permission is denied then allowed again, chrome is doing some weird caching I believe, which is why it will still think that the location permission is denied. Resetting the permissions via chrome solves the issue.

[huzaifa-99]

I believe this is expected behavior for Chrome. From what I could find (and apologies this is from ChatGPT as I couldn't find any official docs from Chrome) there is a term for it "browser permission persistence" / "permission state persistence".

It's also on other websites like this one -> https://permission.site and to add this site is maintained by chromium itself GH -> https://github.com/chromium/permission.site.

To get around this we have to close and reopen the browser tab after we denied permission and then reallowed it. If that doesn't work, we would have to "Reset Permissions"

Apologies if this doesn't sound very helpful but tbh we are not doing anything unexpected, we are just calling the navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition which is a native browser feature, and that call is failing when we deny permission (but it works again if we close and reopen tab).

I also checked if there are any configurations (third param for getCurrentPosition) for navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition that may solve this but none exists from what i found.

cc: @hayata-suenaga @srikarparsi

[hayata-suenaga]

@huzaifa-99

Thank you for the detailed investigation. I really appreciate your effort in investigating the issue and providing very clear summaries.

If this is the browser behavior, then there is nothing we can do. Let's close this issue

[huzaifa-99]

Thanks, I believe we could add some docs about this to the help site (https://help.expensify.com) or update this error message for Chrome accordingly.

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Thoughts @hayata-suenaga?

[hayata-suenaga]

That's a good idea

@huzaifa-99 this is a low priority task, so you can answer this when you have time. I just wanted to confirm the solution for this

• After user denies the permission if then they want to grant location permission again, what should they do?

Memo video for myself

Screen.Recording.2023-09-01.at.3.34.49.PM.mov

[huzaifa-99]

After user denies the permission if then they want to grant location permission again, what should they do?

Whenever the user changes location permissions, they should reload the page (Chrome will automatically suggest that). If they denied and then allowed permission then the current Chrome tab will show the location denied error even when it's allowed.

In this case, a user can either

A. Close and reopen the same tab
B. Reset Website Permissions

cc: @hayata-suenaga