How to Fix Remote Config Changes Not Applied Until App Restart

You push a balance tweak via Remote Config, but players keep the old value until they quit and reopen. Fetch downloads values; activate swaps them in. Activating and re-reading fixes the delay.

How to fix it

1. Fetch then activate

After fetch() completes, call activate() so the new values become current; fetch alone only downloads them into a pending state.

2. Re-read at the use site

Read config values when you actually need them rather than caching them once at boot, so an activate takes effect without a relaunch.

3. Apply safely

For changes that cannot apply mid-session (like a different scene flow), gate them to the next safe boundary, but apply tunable numbers immediately.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every mobile error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.