I have a complex web app, which is working fine in desktop browsers, as well as in the Android native browser (which is part of why I got so long into this project before noticing this problem). The server setup is using the Typesafe Stack (Play/Akka/Scala), but I suspect that's not relevant to the question. Suffice it to say, it uses bog-standard transient session cookies to keep your login.
The problem is, in Chrome and Safari, that transient session appears to be too fragile, and very unpredictably so. In both cases, so long as I am working actively in the browser, everything is fine. But if I switch away from the browser for a while and return to it, it often loses the session cookie, forcing a re-login. Sometimes it takes an hour or two, sometimes just a few minutes -- I haven't yet been able to figure out a pattern.
Note that this doesn't involve closing the tab with my app in it, or manually closing the browser process. I would expect to be able to switch away from Chrome and come back to it using the app switcher and still have my session there; for some reason, though, it seems to be frequently and quickly losing the session cookie. This is a killer problem: users shouldn't be forced to re-login too often.
Any ideas or pointers to why these browsers might be losing their session cookies so easily? I've done lots of web development, but this is my first time seriously targeting mobile browsers, and I'm clearly missing something...
