Add setting to avoid session reset at app restart

[AlexBenny]

The current implementation reset the session at each restart of the app because.
Informations about the session are persisted except for the last event timestamp.
Doing that the tracker is not able to know if the timeout is expired and it resets the session.

It would be useful to add a configuration setting that let the tracker to keep track of the last timestamp and keep the session alive among app restarts.

[hakanbagci]

Hi @AlexBenny,

We are also facing this problem. Every time the app is restarted it creates a new session as you described. This is really affecting the quality of session data. I think it seems more bug rather than an enhancement. Is there any chance to prioritise this ticket?

Thanks

[AlexBenny]

Thanks @hakanbagci for your important feedback about this issue.
I'll raise up the problem at our regular planning for further improvements.
The session management is one of the most important feature of the trackers and any opinion/thought/idea can be very helpful to improve it.

About the issue:
We can't consider that as a defect as it's that by design. An app crash or termination resets the session because it's expected that a user doesn't kill the app during use and a crash should be an unlikely event. The session shouldn't be reset when the app change state from background to foreground, in that case it would be a bug, but we haven't found evidence of that yet.

The best approach for the session analysis would be at the data-processing phase, down in the pipeline, but it is computationally expensive, hence we preprocess session in the tracker.
Unfortunately, keeping track of last event timestamp means that the tracker has to store permanently that information for each event and it can be cause of low performance when the number of events is intense.

Definitely we want to improve the way the session is managed avoiding low performance and raising up the customisation level.

[AlexBenny]

Closing because it has been with no activity for a long time.
Please, feel free to reopen or comment this issue, whether it's of your interest or you want to contribute on this.