Google Analytics for Android v2: dispatch period

Question

I was wondering about dispatch while implementing the new v2 of Google Analytics for my Android app.

If the default period is 30 minutes, and the data needs to be reported in like 24 hours or the data will not be processed, how do apps fare when they are only used like 2 times a week and for a duration of like 5 minutes?

From what I have read I can't seem to find that the app will be staying in the background waiting till the time is up and start submitting? Any insights? Otherwise I'll have to switch to manual dispatch.

Answer 1

I had the same question (though with the v1 GA, I think the issue is the same).

I chose to make the dispatch explicit. I try and use the same scale timeout to trigger the dispatch in the background (every 30 minutes), but I do a dispatch on certain events (like start and suspend, and when the app user hits certain internal milestones). Note that I just went with this for the same reasons you're thinking. I didn't find anything more definitive or do any tests that verified the behavior ...

An additional reason to do this to have a bit more control over the thread that is issuing the dispatch call (instead of just triggering as a side-effect of whichever thread is pushing some new stats into GA).

I don't think there is a 24h timeout on data stored locally that hasn't been pushed. In fact, I thought the problem was that data would get timestamped with its push time, not its actually recording time. But I'm not confident about this either way ...