We are using Firebase/Google analytics for our Android and iOS app. Everything seemed to be sending data correctly and we were able to view the data in Big Query etc. However we started to notice that some data seemed to be getting lost.
We detected an odd situation where some users' analytics data stopped showing on Firebase/Google Analytics/Big Query, despite having previously received data from that user in the past. The data seems to just stop at a random point in time, for random users.
in_app_purchase events from those players were still appearing in the data on dates where they didn't have any other events. We checked our backend service (gamesparks) for their account and could see that they were active players who had been using the app very recently. That is, after their last event was appearing in Big Query.
After investigating some more and started finding other users who had the same issue. They would be sending data without issue and then all of a sudden we would receive nothing from them, except from in_app_purchase events/notification events etc which are sent via a seperate service (app store etc) rather than the client.
After scouring our implementation and going over it line by line comparing to the samples/documentation we couldn't really see any issues, and even the automatic events (session_start etc) stop appearing. We made sure we were using the latest versions of the firebase SDKs etc in the hope it would fix it but it made no difference.
One peculiar thing is that when we find a in_app_purchase event from one of these 'broken' players, things like the user properties and default parameters for that player have changed from when they stopped sending data, so it seems like the lost data is somewhere but not being logged anywhere.
I was wondering if it was possible for specific users to stop their app sending any analytics data to Firebase via a device/google account setting?
While looking into the documentation we noticed that if Google Play Services is installed on the device, data is sent via that, rather than via the client/firebase sdk itself. Is there any known issue with players changing their Google Play Services settings that could cause something like this?
Wondered if this was a known issue but please let me know what other information you might need.
EDIT: I also wanted to mention that although we can't be 100% certain, we believe this is only happening to our Android users. We haven't found any iOS users that have the same issue.
Thanks,
Matt