Android "Duplicate analytics client created"

[cristeahub]

This is a common issue on segment libraries for Android. The issue is that when you have already initialized the segment module on Android you cannot initialize it again without the app crashing.

This happens a lot when doing React Native development on Android, as running the Reload function (shake your device and press Reload) will cause this crash.

One solution is to guard the initialization on Android. While the doc of this project says you can catch errors when setting up, it doesn't seem to be working right now.

Here are some related issues in other repos with the same error:
https://github.com/leoilab/react-native-analytics-segment-io/issues/3
segmentio/analytics-android#538

[PaliwalSparsh]

Hi, I am facing the same issue. I have got "version": "0.0.1-beta.2" from npm and it breaks the app everytime i reload in development mode, saying 'Duplicate analytics client created'.

Should I be worried about using this in production?

Would turning initialization and tracking off in dev mode be a good solution for now. I can do this if I am sure, this problem does not occur in production mode.

[cristeahub]

Should I be worried about using this in production?

In my experience I haven't had any issues in production, only when reloading during development.

One very quick solution is to do something like this:

--- a/android/src/main/java/com/segment/analytics/reactnative/core/RNAnalyticsModule.kt
+++ b/android/src/main/java/com/segment/analytics/reactnative/core/RNAnalyticsModule.kt
@@ -69,9 +69,13 @@ class RNAnalyticsModule(context: ReactApplicationContext): ReactContextBaseJavaM
             builder.logLevel(Analytics.LogLevel.VERBOSE)
         }
 
-        Analytics.setSingletonInstance(
-            RNAnalytics.buildWithIntegrations(builder)
-        )
+        try {
+            Analytics.setSingletonInstance(
+                RNAnalytics.buildWithIntegrations(builder)
+            )
+        } catch(e: Exception) {
+            // Ignore, most likely error during development
+        }
     }
 
     @ReactMethod

With this I haven't had any issues in our builds, neither during development or production. I can't 100 % be sure this won't ever break in production, but our numbers seems to match that this is fine to do.

You can of course also expand this by adding some more error logging if you want to.

[PaliwalSparsh]

Thanks it worked for me. Looking forward for this to be integrated in the main build.

[sfhallahan]

@fathyb any timeline for when e406197 will be merged? Still having problems with this issue

[taykcrane]

@fathyb Hate to bother, but we're excited about this fix too. Let us know if you have a timeline?

[adteulade]

Same here if you could please let us know when the fix has been merged.

[RajanJS]

@fathyb
@michaelkitson
Any updates?

[AChevallier]

The problem is annoying :(

@fathyb
Any updates?

[gsunsnackv]

Me too comment. And also feels in some strange situation we get this in production app

[anandwahed]

@fathyb will the fix be merged anytime soon or is there any other workaround for this issue during the app development?