Session replay ends ~8 minutes after app is backgrounded

[dalnoki]

What React Native libraries do you use?

React Native without Frameworks

Are you using sentry.io or on-premise?

sentry.io (SaS)

@sentry/react-native SDK Version

7.2.0

How does your development environment look like?

added internally

Sentry.init()

added internally

Steps to Reproduce

A customer reported unexpected behavior with session replay in React Native.
Their Sentry init includes:

sessionTrackingIntervalMillis: 1800000, // 30 minutes

They expected the session to stay alive for roughly 30 minutes of inactivity, but observed that the app was backgrounded at 34:58, and the replay ended at 42:37 so about 8 minutes after going to background.

Even though sessionTrackingIntervalMillis is 30 minutes, the replay stops much earlier (~8 minutes).

Expected Result

Replay should remain active (or resume) for up to the configured 30 minutes before timing out.

Actual Result

Replay ends roughly 8 minutes after backgrounding, regardless of the sessionTrackingIntervalMillis value.

[linear]

RN-388

[romtsn]

@zsofia.papp I've taken a look at the internal links — to me this is expected behaviour, it looks like the app just got killed while in background (by the user request or the OS itself has killed it) and there's not much we can do about it

[dalnoki]

@romtsn I may be misunderstanding something, but according to our docs, a session should only end if the app has been in the background for more than 30 seconds or if the 60-minute maximum duration is reached. In this case, neither these condition applies, and the settings the customer provided weren’t applied either.

[romtsn]

@zsofia.papp correct, but this is only describing the positive flow (normal session/app exit). However, if there was an abnormal/crashed exit, we cannot continue recording (or do anything fwiw), because there's no app process anymore.

I can amend the docs to mention this behavior as well