How many mayLaunchUrl we can run at a time?

Question

I am trying to utilize ChromeCustomTabs into our project. I ran into several issue when I used mayLaunchUrl. I checked the code Google has on the github. I simply set up an button to test the mayLaunchURL (prerender feature), when I looked up the traffic using chrome dev tool. I did the the traffic and tab got trigger and the url got loaded ( it is simply a GET call with params). However, when I click it multiple times, (after 8-10times, with different params everytime), it STOP working. I stop seeing the requests sent out. (Not seen on chrome dev tool, nor the Proxy I set up).

I wonder if there is a limit times ( restriction) for mayLaunchURL feature, in other words, how many pages we can pre-render in this case? Is there a way to manually cancel the pre-render page and free the resource?

is there a restriction in terms of times to bindCustomTabsService? The way I did to call mayLaunchURL is to have an activity and kill the activity once I finish the tab. Can I bind the service each time even I “kill (finish)” the activtiy every time?

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    customTabActivityHelper = new CustomTabActivityHelper();
    customTabActivityHelper.setConnectionCallback(this);
}

@Override
    protected void onStart() {
        super.onStart();
            customTabActivityHelper.bindCustomTabsService(this);
        }

@Override
public void onCustomTabsConnected() { 
    Boolean mayLaunchUrlAccepted = customTabActivityHelper.mayLaunchUrl(Uri.parse(“the URL?f=“+params), null, null);

 // the mayLaunchUrlAccepted always return true in my case. Even when there is no request sent.
}

Answer 1

Yes, mayLaunchURL() are very expensive in terms of battery/RAM/network, so it is throttled on app UID level. But limits get dropped after some time.

Best strategy is to use mayLaunchURL() if the confidence that the user will navigate to the URL is very high.

There is the "low confidence" mayLaunchURL() which is not throttled, but performs a more limited set of actions (currently preconnect, not specified which, may change). The low confidence mayLaunchURL is triggered by providing null as the uri and a list of URLs in otherLikelyBundles.