When the app goes to the background, is the session over?

Teams argue about this more than about almost any other line in a sample plan. Someone from engineering wants a new session each time the process is killed. Someone from support wants one session from morning tea until the guest finally pays.

In this studio we do not settle theology. We write a rule on the intake sheet and we obey it for that sample.

The rule we suggest, unless you have a better one already in the files, is this: a session continues through a backgrounding if the guest returns to the same task — same basket, same booking — inside twenty minutes. If they return to a home screen that has forgotten the basket, that is a new visit, and we log the join.

The twenty minutes is not magic. It is long enough for a Malaysian bank page and a one-time password, short enough that a guest who went to lunch is not still “in” a grocery checkout. If your app’s own idle timer is twelve minutes, we can use twelve. What we will not do is change the rule halfway through a sample because a clip is inconvenient.

When we cannot see the bank page — and we usually cannot — we log “left for another app, returned at 14:06” rather than inventing a story about declined cards. The memo may then ask whether your slot clock keeps running during that absence. That question is cheaper than a theory.