I have been observing an increase is very short sessions in my Android app (less than 2 seconds) based on my telemetry and after digging into it, it looks like Android launches the app in the background for a brief moment when it gets updated.
My suspicion is that the Android Play Protect is launching the app to make sure it is not malicious.
How did I come to this conclusion?
- Almost all short sessions happen when a user updates to a new version of the app or happens around the same time every few days
- I am seeing such sessions for my account, on my personal device, even though I am sure I have not launched my app
- My logs show that the app starts launching but then exits after less than 2 seconds
Some additional info:
- My app does not have any background process
- It seems to have started when I updated the target SDK from 29 to 31
- Since that update, I see a spike in user sessions (all under 2 seconds) each time I release an update for the app
I have not been able to find any information about this on the Internet.
Has anybody else experienced something similar? Is this a known behavior?
Thank you
Ben
