Track if the app is terminated by the OS to free memory

[oodavid]

What feature would you like to see?

When our app is terminated by the OS to free memory, we need to know about it.

How would you use it?

For us, we have a flutter app that is occasionally terminated when in the background to free up memory. It's been very difficult to diagnose as it never happens during testing (only customer reports to go on). A lack of data in crashlytics has made the issue invisible to us.

flutter/flutter#48016 (comment)

[google-oss-bot]

I couldn't figure out how to label this issue, so I've labeled it for a human to triage. Hang tight.

[argzdev]

Hi @oodavid, thanks for the input. I'll mark this as a feature request, so that our engineers can have a look and discuss this further for future plans.

[stuartmorgan-g]

Being terminated by the system is the normal way for applications to terminate on mobile devices, so it's not clear what you would do with this data in aggregate.

If your goal is to find out how often the case described in the linked issue is happening, you would need to implement very targeted tracking (e.g., recording a marker on disk just before launching that activity, removing it when returning from the activity, and then checking for that marker on startup and reporting it somehow if it's present since that means you were terminated in the background while the other activity was running). Otherwise you would have no way of distinguishing that case from someone using your app normally, switching to another app, and the system eventually cleaning up your app because they haven't used it in a while.