The invisible problem
I've seen this happen dozens of times in my analytics. A user opens the app, starts a checkout, fills in their name, their address, picks a delivery method. They're on step 3 of 4. And then their phone rings. They pick up. A 5 minute call with their mom, a colleague, whatever. They hang up, go back to the app.
And there it is, the home screen, state completely gone. Flutter did its job, it freed the memory when the process stayed backgrounded too long. Totally normal. Totally invisible to the user.
What the user sees is that they have to start over. Name, address, delivery method. Three minutes of typing gone. No error message, no explanation, just nothing.
The business cost is direct: checkout abandonment. Not a bug. Not a crash. Just the absence of memory between two states. And when you look at your data closely, you realize that window, the background then the return, is a black hole nobody really watches.
