We can see there are a couple of lifecycle events that tell us that the app was restarted during the session. This is an important hint because it means that the Android OS killed our app at some point, which is common when an app stays in the background for a while. With this information, we could try to reproduce the issue by forcing the OS to kill our app in the background and then see how it behaves when reopened from the recently opened apps menu.
After giving it a try, we could reproduce the issue and we found that the static “formId” variable was lost when the app was restarted, causing it to be null when the SecondPage fragment requested it. We can now research best practices of passing arguments to Fragments so we can change our code to prevent relying on static fields and instead store and share values between screens, thus preventing this crash from happening again.
Bonus: For this scenario, it was enough for us to rely on the events that are sent automatically by the APM Agent; however, if those aren’t enough for other cases, we can always send custom events in the places where we want to track the state changes of our app via the OpenTelemetry event API, as shown in the the code snippet below:
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