Sudden significant increase in engagement time on Android App

[Ritesh Gune]

Hello,

Recently, from 25th Aug 2021 to be precise, I see a sudden spike in
Daily User engagement time, across all the versions of my android app
available on the user devices. Earlier it used to be around 5 minutes,
however in the last week it has gone up to 21 minutes on avg.
Earlier the Firebase BOM version used was 26.3.0. Later we rolled out
a new release with the BOM version updated to 28.4.1, but still the
engagement time is around 20-25 minutes. However for my IOS app
nothing as such has been noticed so far.

Any help in this regard is appreciated.

Best Regards,
Ritesh

[Chalermpong Satayavibul]

Hello

I also experiencing this anomaly engagement time in my app. Anomaly began from 25th Aug 2021 too. 

I found in BigQuery log that my app keep sending user_engagement event every one hour (with engagement_time_msec=~3600000) even there is no user activity. 

The percentage of event with engagement_time_msec > 3500000 are collected from a specific app version. So there is no change in app code.

20Aug -> 351 events out of total 1445045 events (0.02%)

25Aug -> 2331 events out of total 2330748 events (0.1%)

2Sep -> 341 events out of 144094 events (0.24%)

2Oct -> 87 events out of 19652 events (0.44%)

I really have no idea how to fix this issue.

Can anyone share how Firebase Analytics track the screen time? 

Regards

Pong

[Chalermpong Satayavibul]

Hello

I found the root cause of incorrect engagement time in my app. 

It happens from this bug I found when app disable screen view tracking. I filed the bug here.

I just removed the line below from AndroidManifest.xml.

<meta-data android:name="google_analytics_automatic_screen_reporting_enabled" android:value="false" />

Regards

Pong