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[Android] TTID (Time to Initial Display) is never emitted on Android despite native initialization and v3 SDK upgrade

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
android, react-native, typescript
Domain
mobile-dev, observability-sre

Research direction

Begin at the Expo Config Plugin entry point withDatadogNativeInit.ts and MainApplication.onCreate, then trace the React Native wrapper's startup handling of native view events; compare Android behavior with the documented native initialization and related issue #1214. Done means reproducing the Android flow and confirming time_to_initial_display is emitted for the initial view without regressing slow_frames or frozen_frames.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement
Describe the bug

After upgrading @datadog/mobile-react-native from 2.14.1 to 3.5.1 (which embeds dd-sdk-android:3.10.0) to unlock Mobile Vitals/TTID metrics, Android TTID (time_to_initial_display) is completely missing / never emitted.

iOS TTID works flawlessly out of the box. On Android, while initial native views (ApplicationLaunch + MainActivity) are correctly created and other mobile vitals like slow_frames / frozen_frames are streaming normally, the core time_to_initial_display attribute remains persistently absent.

Reproduction steps
  1. Setup an Expo project using SDK 51+ with @datadog/mobile-react-native v3.5.1.
  2. Initialize the Datadog SDK natively inside MainApplication.onCreate using an Expo Config Plugin before the React Native bridge starts.
  3. Configure Datadog with nativeViewTracking: true and the new V3 FileBasedConfiguration.
  4. Build the Android app locally or via EAS (eas build --profile production --platform android --local).
  5. Open the app on an Android device, trigger initial views, and inspect the RUM Explorer via Datadog dashboard.
SDK logs
Expected behavior

According to the Datadog documentation, once native initialization is properly configured before the RN runtime starts, the Android SDK should capture the application launch lifecycle and emit the time_to_initial_display metric for the initial view.

Affected SDK versions

3.5.1

Latest working SDK version

None (Upgraded from 2.14.1 which did not support this feature)

Did you confirm if the latest SDK version fixes the bug?

Yes

Integration Methods

NPM

React Native Version

0.85.3

Package.json Contents

{
"name": "x-mobile",
"version": "0.1.44",
"private": true,
"main": "expo-router/entry",
"dependencies": {
"@datadog/mobile-react-native": "3.5.1",
"expo": "56.0.8",
"expo-router": "56.2.8",
"react": "19.2.3",
"react-native": "0.85.3"
},
"packageManager": "[email protected]"
}

iOS Setup
Android Setup

Using Expo Managed Workflow. The native setup is dynamically injected via a custom Expo Config Plugin (withDatadogNativeInit.ts) that adds the required Datadog native initialization code directly into MainApplication.onCreate before the React Native host starts.

Device Information
  • Device: Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (SM-S938B)
  • OS Version: Android 15
  • Network State: Wifi / Cellular
Other relevant information
Summary of the current behavior observed via Datadog RUM (MCP):
Category iOS Android
View Tracking (ApplicationLaunch / MainActivity) ✅ Success ✅ Success
Mobile Vitals (slow_frames / frozen_frames) ✅ Success ✅ Success
time_to_initial_display (TTID) ✅ Success ❌ Never Emitted
Additional Findings:

We noticed that while the underlying dd-sdk-android (v3.10.0) contains multiple upstream TTID fixes (such as #2921, #3031, #3173, #3199), the issue seems to stem from how the React Native wrapper layer interacts with or consumes these native events during startup in a modern React 19 / architecture context.

This looks highly related to the auto-closed issue #1214 where a similar gap was reported but closed due to inactivity without explicit confirmation of a fix.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
145
Forks
65
Avg merge
2d 19h
Merged PRs (30d)
21

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