(MAUI) Lack of logs when Android decides to kill the app activity.

[lucas-zimerman]

Problem Statement

One big issue that plagues Xamarin/MAUI is when your app invokes the camera app expecting a photo stream as return, but while the camera app is open, android kills other activities on background when low memory, in this case killing the xamarin/maui app,
When the photo is taken, the app is open again, but instead of a crash state, the app is return as if it was open for the first time, giving a impression that the app crashed and leaving no logs about it.

Solution Brainstorm

There should be an event generated by the SDK when this type of event happens so users are aware that this is happening to their apps.

DM me if you want a video recording of an MAUI app suffering from this issue

[jamescrosswell]

@lucas-zimerman is there any way we can reproduce this? If we could, then we might be able to see what events or signals are being sent, that we could intercept.

Is this something that you'd expect to be logged as an event/crash?

[lucas-zimerman]

I will take a look to see if I can make a repro

[jpnurmi]

Is it the same behavior as what happens when switching between apps with the "Don't keep activities" developer setting toggled on?

Screencast.From.2025-10-31.18-36-10.mp4

[jpnurmi]

@lucas-zimerman Is there any actual error or exception involved there? It feels more like "business as usual" on Android. Ideally, the app would save and restore its state.

What Sentry.NET could do, though, is to make Android Activity lifecycle events visible as breadcrumbs. That way, if the app would capture an event for a reason or another, it would get clear lifecycle events as breadcrumbs:

• feat(maui): add missing lifecycle events on Android #4688

What do you think?