anyreplay_flutter

Session replay for Flutter apps, by AnyReplay.

flutter pub add anyreplay_flutter

import 'package:anyreplay_flutter/anyreplay_flutter.dart';
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

void main() {
  AnyReplay.init(const AnyReplayOptions(projectKey: 'ar_pk_live_…'));
  runApp(MaterialApp(
    navigatorObservers: [AnyReplayNavigatorObserver()],
    home: const HomeScreen(),
  ));
}

That is the whole install. Taps, screens, errors and the app lifecycle are picked up on their own; the app id and version are read from the app.

Android and iOS, Flutter 3.27 or later. No native code of its own: it uses shared_preferences, package_info_plus and device_info_plus.

What it records, and why not screenshots

Other mobile replay tools record the screen as images. This one records it as a tree of boxes and words, read from Flutter itself: the element tree says what each thing is — a Switch that is on, a TextField that holds a password, the name of an Icon, the address of an Image — and each render object says where it is on screen and how it is drawn.

A screenshot is pixels, and pixels cannot be translated, searched or masked word by word. A tool whose reason to exist is showing a session in the reviewer's own language cannot throw the words away on the way in. So there is no screenshot fallback, ever: what cannot be read as words (an app's own CustomPainter, a web view, a map, a video) is recorded as a labelled placeholder box, with its Semantics label if it has one.

It is also cheap. The first frame of a screen is a few kilobytes and every frame after it carries only what changed; a screen that does not change sends nothing. The screen is read every 500 ms, between frames, never during one.

Flutter	Recorded as
Text, RichText, SelectableText	Text, with size, weight, italics, alignment, colour and line count
TextField, TextFormField, CupertinoTextField	A field, its value (masked per the rules below), its hint and label
ElevatedButton & co., IconButton, FloatingActionButton, CupertinoButton, InkWell, GestureDetector, ListTile with onTap	A button, with its label inside, disabled when it has no handler
Switch, Checkbox, Radio, Slider, progress indicators, their Cupertino twins	The control, with its state
DropdownButton, SegmentedButton, Cupertino pickers	A picker, with its choice
Icon	The icon's name (shopping_cart), never its code point
Image.network / Image.asset	The image's address, or the bundled file uploaded once by content hash
ListView, GridView, PageView, CustomScrollView, SingleChildScrollView	A scroll view and its scroll offset
Container colours, corners, borders, linear gradients; Card, Material	Boxes
Dialogs, menus, bottom sheets	Layers over the screen
The keyboard, the status bar, the home indicator	Their frames — never their contents
CustomPaint (yours), platform views, Texture	An opaque box with its Semantics label
webview_flutter, google_maps_flutter, flutter_map, video_player and others	An opaque web view, map or video box — never the page, the address or the frames

Privacy

A recording contains what a person types into a text field, the same as the browser and React Native SDKs, because a replay of a checkout nobody could finish is worth watching only if you can see what they were trying to enter. Masking is a switch you turn on:

• maskAllInputs: true — every field's value is replaced on the device.
• maskAllTyping: true — the same, and not weakened by maskAllInputs: false set elsewhere in your configuration.
• AnyReplayMask(child: …) — one widget, and everything inside it.
• maskImages: true — no image addresses or uploads at all.

AnyReplayMask(child: Text(order.deliveryAddress))

Some fields are masked in every mode and no option records them:

Masked without being asked	Read from
A secure field	obscureText: true
A password, new password or one-time code	autofillHints (AutofillHints.password, .newPassword, .oneTimeCode), keyboardType: TextInputType.visiblePassword
A card number, security code, expiry or cardholder name	autofillHints (AutofillHints.creditCard…)
A field whose hint, label, Semantics label, restorationId or string Key names one of the above	hintText, labelText, Key('cvv-input')
A value of 13–19 digits that passes the card-number check, or more than six digits of one still being typed	the value itself
A card number written inside longer text ("my card is 4242 4242 …") — only its digits are starred	the value itself

A masked element keeps its box and loses its words: the reviewer sees that something was typed, and where, and never what. The value is replaced on the device — it is not sent and then hidden. A field's hint is kept: it is the app's copy, not the person's input.

Where a phone knows less than a browser

A browser field carries type, autocomplete and a name the framework wrote. A Flutter TextField() with no hints says nothing about itself, so such a field is recorded, consistently with the web, and only the card-number check on its value can catch it. A post code, an e-mail address or a phone number is not payment data and is recorded. If your screens carry anything you would not want a teammate to read, set maskAllInputs: true, give the field autofillHints, or wrap it in AnyReplayMask.

Error messages

Error messages and stack traces have e-mail addresses, card numbers and long tokens replaced with [redacted] on the device before they are sent.

Consent

AnyReplay.init(const AnyReplayOptions(projectKey: 'ar_pk_live_…', requireConsent: true));

// When the person answers:
AnyReplay.consent(true);   // starts recording
AnyReplay.consent(false);  // stops, and deletes everything AnyReplay stored

With requireConsent: true nothing is stored, sent or read — no visitor id, no request, no error hook, no look at the screen — until consent(true). track, trackError and identify calls made before then wait in memory and are sent when recording starts. consent(false) at any time stops recording and removes every anyreplay.* key from the device; a later consent(true) is a new visitor.

Screens

AnyReplayNavigatorObserver names each screen after its route (RouteSettings.name), for Navigator and for go_router:

MaterialApp(navigatorObservers: [AnyReplayNavigatorObserver()]);
GoRouter(observers: [AnyReplayNavigatorObserver()], routes: [...]);

A query string or fragment is cut off; name routes by what they are (/orders/:id), never by who is looking (/orders/829461). Dialogs, sheets and menus are layers of the screen they open over, not screens. Routes without a name change nothing; pass nameOf: to name them yourself, or call AnyReplay.screen('Checkout') from your own navigation code.

Errors, events, people

AnyReplay.track('checkout_started', {'cart': 3});
AnyReplay.identify(userId: 'u_1842', email: 'ayse@example.com');

try {
  await pay();
} catch (error, stack) {
  AnyReplay.trackError(error, stack);
}

Uncaught errors are recorded on their own (recordErrors: true, the default): AnyReplay installs FlutterError.onError and PlatformDispatcher.onError when recording starts, always calls the handlers that were there before — your crash reporter, Flutter's console output and red screen keep working — and puts them back on stop(). Install your own handlers before or after AnyReplay.init; either order works.

identify links the session to a person in your system. Call it wherever you know who the person is — right after init is fine: the SDK holds it until the session's first chunk has reached AnyReplay, then sends it once (two calls while it waits go as one request). After that it goes at once. A session that starts after 30 idle minutes is linked to the same person again. It is never stored on the device. Calling it makes the session personal data: see the store answers below.

Flutter has no console with levels, so nothing is read from print or debugPrint.

Options

Option	Default
projectKey	—	The public key from the dashboard.
ingestUrl	https://in.anyreplay.com	Only for self-hosting.
appId, appVersion	read from the app	Override what package_info_plus reports.
sampleRate	1	Share of people recorded, decided once per person.
requireConsent	false	Wait for consent(true).
maskAllInputs, maskAllTyping, maskImages	false	See Privacy.
recordErrors	true	Uncaught errors.
maxSessionsPerMonth	—	Stop starting sessions after this many in a month.
snapshotInterval	500 ms	How often the screen is read; never below 100 ms.
storage	shared_preferences	Where the visitor id lives; any AnyReplayStore.
debug	false	Print decisions, prefixed [anyreplay].

AnyReplay.flush() sends what is buffered; AnyReplay.stop() ends recording for the launch. Every method is safe to call at any time, before init has finished included, and none ever throws into your app.

Sessions, taps and delivery

• A session ends after 30 minutes without activity; an app that comes back after that starts a new one.
• A tap is recorded when the finger lifts, where it went down, if it moved less than the touch slop. Scrolls and drags are not taps. Three taps within a second in the same spot flag the session as a rage tap.
• Going to the background (AppLifecycleState.hidden/paused) sends what is buffered at once, then reading and timers stop until the app returns.
• Offline, events wait in memory (at most 2000) and are retried with backoff; a refusal from the server (a full quota, an app not on the project's allowed list) stops recording for the launch.

Store requirements

App Store. This package uses no required-reason API itself and ships no PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy; the plugins it depends on ship their own (shared_preferences: UserDefaults, CA92.1; package_info_plus and device_info_plus declare theirs). In your App Store privacy answers, AnyReplay collects — not linked to the user, not used for tracking, for analytics: Product Interaction, Other User Content (the words on screen), Crash Data, Other Diagnostic Data, and a Device ID (the install's visitor id). If you call identify, also declare User ID and/or Email Address as linked to the user.

Google Play. Data safety: collected, not shared, encrypted in transit, deletable on request — App activity (App interactions; Other user-generated content), App info and performance (Crash logs; Diagnostics), Device or other IDs. Personal info (User IDs, Email address) only if you call identify. Only INTERNET is needed. Exclude the shared_preferences file from Auto Backup so a restored phone is a new visitor:

<!-- res/xml/data_extraction_rules.xml -->
<data-extraction-rules>
  <cloud-backup>
    <exclude domain="sharedpref" path="FlutterSharedPreferences.xml"/>
    <exclude domain="file" path="datastore/"/>
  </cloud-backup>
</data-extraction-rules>

Performance

On a screen of 300 recorded boxes, reading the tree takes about 2 ms in a debug test run on a laptop (test/capture_test.dart prints it). Release-build numbers on mid-range phones are published here before 1.0.

Known limits

• One view: multi-window and multi-view apps are recorded from their first view.
• A CustomPainter, a chart library that paints, a game: an opaque box with its Semantics label. Wrap one in Semantics(label: …) to give it a name.
• Web views are opaque; their pages are not recorded (planned).
• Icons from your own icon fonts are recorded as "an icon was here".
• An --obfuscate build cannot recognise web views, maps, video players or your own painters by name; they fall back to opaque boxes, and your CustomPaint drawings are not marked as drawings.
• Images inside decorations (DecorationImage, CircleAvatar.backgroundImage) are recorded as their box.

Development

flutter test
dart run tool/generate_tables.dart   # after a Flutter upgrade: icon names, framework painters

flutter test writes the contract's conformance scenario to build/anyreplay-conformance/; in the AnyReplay monorepo,

pnpm --filter @anyreplay/shared conformance packages/recorder-flutter/build/anyreplay-conformance/*.ndjson

checks it against the SDK contract.

MIT © Baem Tech