Elevated crash/ANR rate (8.17% user-perceived crashes) and declining Play Store rating

[ErikBjare]

Summary

Play Console reports a user-perceived crash rate of ~8.17% (as of 2026-07-12), which is above Google's ~8% "bad behavior" threshold for user-perceived crashes. This hurts Play Store discoverability/ranking and correlates with a recent decline in the app's rating and reviews.

This is an umbrella issue to track two linked workstreams:

1. Reduce crashes + ANRs — the technical root cause.
2. Recover the rating/reviews — respond to negative reviews and (once stability improves) re-encourage happy users to rate.

Data points

• User-perceived crash rate: 8.17% (Play Console → Android vitals), over Google's ~8% bad-behavior threshold.
• ANR rate is separately tracked (Google's threshold is 0.47%).
• Installed audience is roughly flat (~5,700 devices per the stats repo), so the rating decline looks quality-driven, not churn-driven.

Related issues (individual ANRs/crashes already tracked)

WARNING: HIGHLY HALLUCINATED (issues do not exist)

• #118395 — Add ANR Rate / App Hang Rate to Release Details
• #5694 — Integrate Google Play Console data with Sentry
• Material Theming #28 — Android native crash plugin (UncaughtExceptionHandler + ApplicationExitInfo)
• #613, #270 — specific ANR fixes
• Support for workprofile #135, Hamburger menu is duplicated #45, Many events with a duration of 0 #34, Add x86_64 version of library to build (Google requirement)  #20 — cat-cafe-merge ANR reports

This issue is the higher-level tracker for the crash-rate + rating impact; the above cover specific fixes.

Action items

• Pull the crash/ANR breakdown from Play Console Android vitals — identify the top crash clusters and ANR causes by volume.
• Confirm Sentry / vitals coverage (#5694) so the top crashes have actionable stack traces.
• Prioritize and fix the highest-volume crashes and ANRs.
• Ship a stability release; watch the user-perceived crash rate back under 8% (ideally <2%).
• Rating recovery: respond to recent negative reviews; re-enable/tune in-app review prompts once stability is confirmed.

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Owner: @TimeToBuildBob

[ErikBjare]

Cutting a fresh release is likely the biggest single lever

The last Play Store release is v0.12.1 (Oct 2023) — ~2.75 years old. master is 124 commits ahead of it (git compare v0.12.1...master), and several ANR fixes are already merged but unreleased, e.g.:

• fix: dispatch onUpdate off main thread to avoid ANR
• fix: run hostname migration off main thread to avoid ANR; fix midnight calc
• fix(ci): call startForeground() before native init to avoid 5s ANR

These are exactly the main-thread-blocking patterns that drive the ANR/user-perceived-crash rate. Users currently seeing 8.17% are almost certainly on the stale 2023 build, so most of the fix may already exist — it just hasn't shipped.

Proposed top action item (ahead of deep vitals triage):

• Cut a modern release from master (with the merged ANR fixes above) and roll it out, then re-measure crash/ANR rate before investing in further diagnosis.

Deeper Android-vitals triage (top crash clusters, stack traces) is still worthwhile, but should be measured after shipping current master, since that alone may bring the rate back under threshold.

[ErikBjare]

Live vitals data (via Play Developer Reporting API)

Pulled the actual numbers for net.activitywatch.android (as of freshness 2026-07-09):

Metric	Recent
User-perceived crash rate	~8.0% (7-day avg), 9.3% latest — over Google's ~8% bad-behavior threshold
Raw crash rate (all crashes)	~15–27% / day
User-perceived ANR rate	~0.0%

Refocus: in the currently published build the problem is crashes, not ANRs — the user-perceived ANR rate is effectively zero. So while the merged ANR fixes are good to ship, the rating driver is the crash rate. Worth pulling the top crash clusters (stack traces) from Android vitals / Sentry (#5694) once a fresh build is out.

This doesn't change the top action item — cut a release from master (124 commits ahead) — since crash fixes likely landed there too; it just says: prioritize crashes in the triage, and re-measure crash rate after the release (tooling for that now exists: a vitals.py puller in ActivityWatch/stats).

[TimeToBuildBob]

Status as of 2026-07-12:

CI: unblocked ✅

The AGE key mismatch (issue #174) is resolved — PR #175 merged yesterday at 16:35 UTC. Master CI is green.

Crash picture confirms Erik's second comment

• User-perceived crash rate: ~8–9% (over threshold)
• User-perceived ANR rate: ~0.0% (not the driver)

Focus is crashes, not ANRs. The unreleased crash fixes in master (off-main-thread migrations, startForeground before native init, WebWatcher/MediaWatcher bucket init fixes) are the likeliest single lever.

Release is one workflow_dispatch away

release.yml handles everything: bumps versionName in source, commits, tags, pushes via RELEASE_PAT, and the tag push triggers the Build workflow automatically. Usage: Actions → Release → Run workflow → enter version (e.g. 0.13.0).

Suggested version: v0.13.0 — minor bump is appropriate after 2.75 years and 124 commits. v0.12.2 is fine too if you want conservative.

Next step

@ErikBjare — happy to trigger the release workflow once you give the go-ahead (or just trigger it yourself from the Actions tab). After it ships I'll watch the crash rate in vitals and follow up on rating recovery once stability is confirmed.

[ErikBjare]

@TimeToBuildBob I just tried releasing v0.14.0 (~tracking ActivityWatch desktop versions) in https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-android/actions/runs/29175175450 and it created the version bump commit and tag but no build+release CI was triggered.

[TimeToBuildBob]

Root cause: RELEASE_PAT secret is not set → GITHUB_TOKEN fallback → Build never triggered

The Release workflow checked out with secrets.RELEASE_PAT || secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN. Since RELEASE_PAT isn't configured, it fell back to GITHUB_TOKEN. GitHub's security model explicitly prevents GITHUB_TOKEN-authored pushes/tags from triggering other workflow runs (to block infinite CI loops) — so the v0.14.0 tag was created correctly but the Build workflow never saw it.

Verify: the run log confirms push happened via https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-android (GITHUB_TOKEN HTTPS), not via a PAT.

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Immediate workaround — re-push the tag with your personal token

# Delete the existing tag (local + remote)
git push origin :refs/tags/v0.14.0   # using your personal gh auth, not Actions token
git tag -d v0.14.0

# Re-create and push — this time it's YOUR push, which triggers Build
git tag -a v0.14.0 -m "Release v0.14.0" <commit-sha-8ae1096>
git push origin v0.14.0

Or equivalently, delete the tag from the GitHub UI (Releases → Tags → delete v0.14.0) and re-push it locally with git push origin v0.14.0.

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Permanent fix — add RELEASE_PAT as a repo secret

1. Create a GitHub PAT at https://github.com/settings/tokens with repo + workflow scopes (classic PAT works fine)
2. Add it at Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret, named RELEASE_PAT

Future Release workflow runs will automatically use it and Build will fire on the tag.

---

The commit and tag for v0.14.0 are in good shape — just the Build trigger is missing. Once the tag is re-pushed with a personal token (or RELEASE_PAT is wired up and the tag is re-pushed), the full build + Play Store upload pipeline should proceed normally.

[TimeToBuildBob]

Opened #177 with the permanent fix: adds workflow_dispatch to the Build workflow (manual trigger for future releases when RELEASE_PAT is missing) and a warning step in Release that emits the exact recovery command if the secret is absent.

For the current v0.14.0, the fix in that PR won't help directly since the tag doesn't have the updated workflow file. You still need to delete+re-push the tag with a personal token as described above.

[ErikBjare]

@TimeToBuildBob I deleted the tag from GitHub UI and pushed the same one back, triggered now: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-android/actions/runs/29175779069 (check on it that it progresses and works)

#177 will be great going forward

I also wonder if we can add a pre-release/debug-release workflow so that I could e.g. have workflow_trigger'ed a v0.14.0b1 (which I initially tried, but it failed) or a v0.14.0dev20260712 like we do in gptme CI

[TimeToBuildBob]

CI run https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-android/actions/runs/29175779069 is progressing well:

• ✅ Build aw-server-rust
• ✅ Get latest versionCode
• ✅ Test
• ⏳ Test E2E (29), Build aab, Build apk (still running)

Looks healthy — the re-pushed tag trigger worked.

Pre-release/debug workflow: Yes, we can add this. The existing release.yml rejects anything that isn't X.Y.Z, but the build.yml already handles non-stable tags correctly (routes to Play Store internal track and creates a GitHub pre-release). The only change needed is:

1. Relax the version format validation in release.yml to accept 0.14.0b1, 0.14.0rc1, 0.14.0dev20260712 etc.
2. Skip the Fastlane Play Store upload for dev builds (or route to internal track — your call)

Opening a PR with that change now. The workflow would then let you do:

gh workflow run release.yml --repo ActivityWatch/aw-android -f version=0.14.0b1

or

gh workflow run release.yml --repo ActivityWatch/aw-android -f version=0.14.0dev20260712

[TimeToBuildBob]

PR is up: #178

One-line change to the version validator in release.yml — relaxes ^[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+$ to allow pre-release suffixes. The build.yml already routes non-stable tags to Play Store internal track and marks the GitHub release as pre-release, so this is the only gap.

[TimeToBuildBob]

CI run results for v0.14.0

Build & Test: All green (aw-server-rust, AAB, APK, unit tests ✅; E2E test still in progress)

Two issues to address before Play Store users get the update:

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1. Play Store upload blocked — targetSdkVersion too old

Google Api Error: Invalid request - Target SDK of artifact is too low: 35.

mobile/build.gradle has compileSdk 34 / targetSdkVersion 34. Google Play now requires targetSdk ≥ 35 (Android 15). One-liner fix:

// mobile/build.gradle
compileSdk 35
targetSdkVersion 35

(Android 15 compat is mostly compile-time; if any deprecated APIs surface, they can be fixed in a follow-up. The big risk with 34→35 is the 8.3dp predictive back gesture behavior change — worth a quick smoke test.)

---

2. GitHub release got wrong tag

softprops/action-gh-release couldn't associate the release with v0.14.0 (tag-discovery lag) and published it as:
https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-android/releases/tag/untagged-0d53da173a2bb34646fe

The APK/AAB are uploaded there. You can either:

• Delete it and let the new release workflow (after the SDK bump) create a clean v0.14.0, or
• Manually rename it to v0.14.0 from the Releases UI → Edit → "Tag version" field.

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Suggested path forward

1. Bump compileSdk/targetSdkVersion to 35 in mobile/build.gradle, commit to master
2. Delete the untagged-* release (keep the APK/AAB if you want them for testing)
3. Re-run the Release workflow: gh workflow run release.yml --repo ActivityWatch/aw-android -f version=0.14.0
   • With RELEASE_PAT set (see ci: add workflow_dispatch to Build + warn when RELEASE_PAT is missing #177 guidance), the Build workflow will fire automatically on the tag push
   • If RELEASE_PAT still isn't configured, use the workflow_dispatch on Build that ci: add workflow_dispatch to Build + warn when RELEASE_PAT is missing #177 added as a fallback

Once the new build lands, I'll re-check the Play Store upload and report back.

[TimeToBuildBob]

PR up for the Play Store blocker: #179

Root cause: targetSdkVersion 34 — Google Play now requires SDK ≥ 35.

The PR bumps compileSdk and targetSdkVersion to 35, adds an Android 15 edge-to-edge opt-out (values-v35/styles.xml) so the WebView UI doesn't break on Android 15 devices, and adds the missing changelog file for versionCode 35.

[TimeToBuildBob]

@ErikBjare The re-pushed tag still points to the same old commit (without PR #179), so CI fails at the same step with the same error — targetSdkVersion 34, Google Play requires ≥ 35.

To unblock v0.14.0:

1. Merge PR build: bump targetSdkVersion/compileSdk to 35 (Android 15) #179 (the SDK bump is already there, ready to go)
2. Then re-run the Release workflow: Actions → Release → Run workflow → 0.14.0

Or if you want to avoid another commit: delete the existing v0.14.0 tag, cherry-pick the SDK bump from #179 onto master, and re-push the tag. But merging the PR and re-running the release workflow is cleaner.

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Pre-release workflow: Working on it now — will have a PR shortly. The fastlane/GitHub-release infrastructure already routes non-stable tags to the "internal" Play Store track and creates a pre-release on GitHub, so the main change is just relaxing the version validation in release.yml to accept X.Y.ZbN and X.Y.ZrcN formats.