Android Session Recordings

[joethreepwood]

The Session Recording team is currently considering improving PostHog by adding the ability to capture session recordings from mobile devices running Android. This is part of work documented on https://github.com/PostHog/product-internal/issues/354.

There are many recording tools out there for web, and different tools for mobile -- but few for both. If we could unlock mobile session recordings, even with reduced functionality, it could be huge - especially for self-hosted customers who have few options in this space. Additionally, this would make PostHog more competitive with other session recording tools, such as HotJar.

🗂 Considered Goals

• Run a PoC implementation for Android

Please note we are considering iOS mobile recordings and React Native solutions as separate issues.

These goals are being considered by the Session Recording Team and we'd love to hear user feedback, as well as ideas for stretch goals or implementation. Please add to this issue!

If you like this idea, please leave a 👍 or ❤️ reaction on this post to vote for it -- your votes and feedback help us prioritize what to work on next!

[marandaneto]

We're working on Session Replay for Mobile, the goal is to playback sessions to diagnose UI issues, improve support, and get context for nuanced user behavior.

We're interested in understanding how useful it is, the expectations you may have, etc, for example:

• Is high fidelity important? would be okay if it was a representation of the UI instead of screenshots?
• Is masking text (due to PII) a must-have feature?
• How would you define a session (the start and end of the recording)? would you expect that to be done automatically or manually via an API eg PostHog.startRecording and stopRecording?
• Would you like to sample recordings or do you prefer to have it all? (think about data usage, storage, slow internet)
• What's an acceptable performance impact while the recording is running?
• Is network inspection useful? (HTTP status code, request, and response payload).
• And much more...

We'd like to understand a little bit better so we are sure that we are building a feature that people would love to use.

Any feedback is appreciated, let me know if you'd be willing to trade a bit of your time for being a preview user as soon as it's out.

Thanks.

[marandaneto]

Hey you all,

We have an alpha preview for Android Session Recording and we'd like to gather feedback.
Would you like to give it a try? See the instructions.

Let us know what you think and if there are any bugs and/or issues you may face.

[marandaneto]

Closing this since we are beta testing already, see docs.
For actionable feedback, feel free to raise a new issue or comment on this issue.

[thisames]

hey guys, beta session replay recording for android is not enabled to work in production?

I'm doing several tests in several cases in the Android SDK. Getting and testing events.

I'm a little confused about the recordings. I believe I'm configuring everything correctly. However, no recordings are arriving on my posthog dashboard.

I am following all the limitations of the doc

• Session replay requires PostHog Android SDK version 3.4.0
• Requires Android API >= 26.
• Enable Recording of Session Replays for Android
• Requires Record user sessions to be enabled in the PostHog Project Settings

    @Override
    public void onCreate() {
        super.onCreate();

        PostHogSessionReplayConfig replayConfig = new PostHogSessionReplayConfig();
        replayConfig.setMaskAllTextInputs(false);
        replayConfig.setMaskAllImages(false);
        replayConfig.setCaptureLogcat(true);
        replayConfig.setScreenshot(true);

        PostHogAndroidConfig config = new PostHogAndroidConfig(
                POSTHOG_API_KEY,
                POSTHOG_HOST,
                false,
                false,
                true,
                replayConfig
        );

        config.setDebug(true);
        config.setFlushAt(1);
        config.setCaptureDeepLinks(false);
        config.setCaptureApplicationLifecycleEvents(false);
        config.setCaptureScreenViews(true);
        config.setSessionReplay(true);
        config.setPreloadFeatureFlags(true);

        PostHogAndroid.setup(this, config);
    }

I also tried with kotlin android applications and the sdk sample itself, but I didn't get any feedback in the records.

If possible, I would like to understand the current context of Android recordings.

[marandaneto]

@thisames everything seems fine with your configuration.
Is session replay enabled on your project configuration?
Can you check the console logs and see if you spot anything?
Raise an issue on https://github.com/postHog/posthog-android so we can debug this together.

[marandaneto]

For reporting issues, just raise a new issue using the bug report template, please share all the context you have including error/stack trace, logs, your SDK config, OS version, etc.