Automatic Screen Tracking in Android (Kotlin) SDK

This guide walks you through the automatic screen tracking feature available in the Android (Kotlin) SDK.

The iOS (Swift) SDK does not support automatic screen tracking.

• For iOS (Swift) apps, you can send screen events manually with analytics.screen() — see the screen API reference for more information.
• For UIKit-based apps, you can also use a custom plugin — see the UIKitAutomaticScreenTrackingPlugin example for more information. Note that this example supports UIKit-based navigation only and does not support SwiftUI-based navigation.

Activity tracking

You can use the Android (Kotlin) SDK to automatically track activities (Android Activity class). By enabling this feature, the SDK sends screen events for any Activity opened by the client app.

Usage

To enable automatic activity tracking, pass the trackActivities parameter as true in the Configuration object when initializing the SDK.

analytics = Analytics(
    configuration = Configuration(
        writeKey = "YOUR_WRITE_KEY",
        application = application,
        dataPlaneUrl = "YOUR_DATA_PLANE_URL",
        trackActivities = true
    )
)

Navigation-Destination tracking

The Android (Kotlin) SDK provides a setNavigationDestinationsTracking API for automatically tracking user navigation within your Android application by leveraging a NavController.

The API listens to any screen changes and sends the corresponding screen events to RudderStack.

Workflow

• The setNavigationDestinationsTracking API utilizes OnDestinationChangedListener to detect any navigation changes.
• It also integrates with the onStart lifecycle callback of the user activity to ensure screen events are captured when the app is foregrounded or when any configuration changes occur.
• If multiple NavController instances are used in the Android app, you must call this API separately for each instance.

Usage

This section explains how to use the setNavigationDestinationsTracking API depending on your app setup:

Jetpack Compose navigation

If your app uses Jetpack Compose with NavController, you can set up the navigation tracking as follows:

@Composable
fun MyApp() {
    val navController = rememberNavController()

    LaunchedEffect("first_launch") {
        analytics.setNavigationDestinationsTracking(navController, this@MainActivity)
    }

    MyNavHost(navController = navController)
}

Fragments navigation

If your app uses Fragments with the navigation component, use the following setup in MainActivity:

class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity() {

    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)

        val binding = ActivityMainBinding.inflate(layoutInflater)
        setContentView(binding.root)

        val navHostFragment = supportFragmentManager
            .findFragmentById(R.id.nav_host_fragment) as NavHostFragment
        val navController = navHostFragment.navController

        analytics.setNavigationDestinationsTracking(navController, this@MainActivity)
    }
}

Parameter description

The key parameters covered in the above snippets are explained below: