Known analytics issues
Written by Lois Mortimer
Updated at July 20th, 2025
Table of Contents
This document provides an overview of the known issues affecting analytics tracking across our iOS, Android and Web platforms. Our team is actively working to resolve these issues to ensure that all features are tracking as expected.
Cross-platform issues
| Event / feature | Issue description | Versions affected | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| BoltVideo* | Currently in-content YouTube videos (those on article pages) are not tracking any analytics events. | Under investigation | Fix in progress |
| Mixpanel | In Bolt version 4.0 we made a change to the user ID that's used to identify logged in Mixpanel users to ensure that it's always unique. This resulted in a new user profile being created for those users when they updated to Bolt version 4.0 thus double counting them over the period. This effects all reports spanning the period that your app updated to Bolt version 4.0+ from an earlier version. | Bolt 3.24 (Android) & 4.0.5 (iOS) | Fix in progress |
| pugpigSubscriberStatus | The event-scoped pugpigSubscriberStatus dimension stopped tracking. The user-scoped dimension was tracked at this time. | Bolt versions 3.16.5-3.20.7 | Fixed in 3.21.6 |
| SearchAttempt | SearchAttempt event fires on every user keystroke resulting in a significant increase in the volume of SearchAttempt events. | Search version 2.3 | Fixed in Search version 2.3.14 |
| BoltSave / BoltUnsave | Sending two events every time a user interacts with the save icon from the timeline. | Timeline versions < 5.3 | Fixed in Timeline version 5.3. Fix in progress for save icons in kebab menus |
Bolt Android
| Event / feature | Issue description | Versions affected | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| BoltNotificationOpen |
The event captures a fraction of true notification opens as it only fires when the app is in the foreground.
To glean true numbers, use the notification provider or |
Under investigation | Fixed in 4.3 |
Bolt iOS
| Event / feature | Issue description | Versions affected | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| BoltSubscriptionPurchase | On iOS both renewals and purchases are being tracked by the BoltSubscriptionPurchase event | All known versions | Pending a fix |
| Screen View |
Screen interruptions (e.g. Apple's App Tracking Transparency, phone calls, a Google interstitial ad) resulted in duplicate screen views. In some cases, this resulted in the start screen sending two screen views after a fresh restart (e.g. after the app is force killed). |
Fixed in 4.3 | |
| Screen View | Two screen view events fire for each page in an edition (only impacts editions with double page spreads). | 4.1.0 - 4.1.12 | Fixed in 4.1.13 |
| Screen View | It is standard practice with iOS background fetch to render the app screen in the background so that when the user launches the app, the new content is readily available. This behaviour resulted in a screen view erroneously sending when the app fetched new content while the app was backgrounded thus inflating iOS app screen views. Bolt versions 3.21 onwards suppress the background screen view event, ensuring that screen view events are only fired when a user foregrounds the app. For more information on how background fetch may impact your analytics, visit our analytics starter guide. | 3.19-3.20 | Fixed in 3.21.6 |
Bolt Web
| Event / feature | Issue description | Versions affected | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| User counts | Our Web Mixpanel implementation generated a new device ID for each anonymous (logged-out) session, resulting in a separate user profile being created for every new session. | Since Mixpanel (6.0) | Fixed in 6.5.10 |
| Page views |
Please see standalone documentation for further details.
Multiple page view events recorded per user action caused by automatic page view tracking in GA4 and Mixpanel
Manual page view tracking behaviour moving forward:
|
All versions | Fixed in Web 6.2.12 |
| Page views | Article page views track multiple times when one article is visited, caused by the “page changes based on browser history events” setting in the GA console. | Since GA4 | Fixed in Bolt Web 5.20.0 |
| All events | Only page views sent when interacting with Bolt Web. | 5.17.7 | Fixed in Bolt 5.20.0 |
Third party providers
| Event / feature | Issue description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Mixpanel dates |
Mixpanel forces all values it recognises as dates into the format MM-DD-YYYY. It uses the logic whereby if the date is sent as A-B-YYYY: This results in date properties – e.g. edition names – being forced into MM-DD-YYYY despite not being sent in this format. |
We have raised this with Mixpanel. No fix is currently scheduled |
| GA4 engagement_time | Cannot be sent with manually tracked screen_view event on iOS (see Firebase post). Sends with separate user_engagement event. | Pending Firebase fix |
| GA4 engagement_time | Elevated engagement duration on Android. See Firebase issue for more detail. Firebase made improvements in May 2024 however engagement duration on Android may remain inflated. | Pending Firebase fix |