fix(autocapture): prevent scroll gestures from triggering dead clicks

[Mercy811]

Summary

• use completed native click events as dead-click candidates so canceled touch scroll gestures are ignored
• preserve pointerdown input for rage-click and error-click detection
• add regression coverage for the detector event sources and a manual scroll-flick test page

Root cause

The shared click observable listened to pointerdown. On touch devices, beginning a scroll over an allowlisted element emitted a pointerdown even though the gesture never completed as a click. If the page did not navigate or mutate within the dead-click timeout, the SDK incorrectly reported a dead click.

Event-source history and rationale

Dead-click and rage-click tracking were originally introduced in #1146 using one shared native click observable. #1210 later changed that shared observable to pointerdown to improve rage-click capture on mobile. Rapid mobile taps can be consumed by browser scrolling, panning, or zoom gestures before a completed click is emitted, whereas pointerdown records each attempted press immediately. That makes pointerdown the appropriate signal for counting repeated rage interactions.

Because the observable was shared, the rage-click fix also moved dead-click detection to pointerdown, even though that was not the stated purpose of #1210. A dead click represents a completed activation that produced no response; a touch that begins a scroll is not a completed activation. This PR splits the streams so rage clicks keep the mobile behavior from #1210 while dead clicks return to their original native click boundary.

Error clicks continue to use pointerdown for a separate reason: the correlated browser error may occur in an early pointer handler before a native click is emitted. Other frustration signals retain their existing event sources.

Impact

Scroll flicks that begin over large interactive elements such as product-card links no longer produce dead-click false positives. Existing rage-click and error-click behavior remains unchanged.

Testing

• pnpm --filter @amplitude/plugin-autocapture-browser build
• pnpm --filter @amplitude/plugin-autocapture-browser exec jest --watchman=false --runInBand (24 suites, 418 tests)
• pnpm --filter @amplitude/plugin-autocapture-browser lint
• git diff --check

Linear

SDK-200: Need to be fixed: Dead Click false positives from scroll-flick touches

---

Note

Medium Risk
Changes frustration autocapture event sourcing for dead vs rage/error clicks; behavior is well-tested but affects analytics signal semantics on touch devices.

Overview
Dead-click detection now listens for completed native click events instead of sharing a single pointerdown stream, so touch scroll-flicks that start on links (e.g. product cards) no longer time out as dead clicks when no navigation or mutation occurs.

The frustration plugin wires two enriched observables: click for dead clicks and pointerdown for rage and error clicks, preserving prior mobile behavior for those signals. PointerDownObservable is added to ObservablesEnum and AllWindowObservables.

Regression tests cover scroll-gesture vs real dead click vs mutation cancellation and rage-from-pointerdown; unit tests mock the split streams. A manual scroll-flick test page was added under test-server/autocapture/.

^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit b22f96d. Configure here.}

[linear-code]

SDK-200

[Mercy811]

bugbot run

[github-actions]

size-limit report 📦

Path	Size
packages/analytics-browser/lib/scripts/amplitude-min.js.gz	61.58 KB (+0.07% 🔺)
packages/session-replay-browser/lib/scripts/session-replay-browser-min.js.gz	134.97 KB (0%)
packages/unified/lib/scripts/amplitude-min.umd.js.gz	215.63 KB (+0.02% 🔺)
@amplitude/element-selector (gzipped esm)	2.67 KB (0%)

[cursor]

✅ Bugbot reviewed your changes and found no new issues!

Comment @cursor review or bugbot run to trigger another review on this PR

^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit b22f96d. Configure here.}

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

💡 Codex Review

Here are some automated review suggestions for this pull request.

Reviewed commit: b22f96d293

ℹ️ About Codex in GitHub

Your team has set up Codex to review pull requests in this repo. Reviews are triggered when you

• Open a pull request for review
• Mark a draft as ready
• Comment "@codex review".

If Codex has suggestions, it will comment; otherwise it will react with 👍.

Codex can also answer questions or update the PR. Try commenting "@codex address that feedback".