this has been driving me absolutely insane for the past few weeks. I'll be maybe 200-300 meters out, nothing crazy, good line of sight, and the app just drops connection. The drone stays in the air and RTH kicks in which is fine I guess but it's happened three times now and i'm starting to wonder if it's my phone or the app or something with the RC signal. I'm on a pretty recent Android, updated everything.

Tried clearing the cache and reinstalling the app which helped for like one flight and then it happened again. Havent changed anything in my setup either, same phone mount, same location basically. starting to wonder if one of the recent app updates broke something because it never used to do this

Which drone are you on? Makes a difference. I had something similar with my Air 2S a while back and it turned out to be a background app on my phone hogging the connection, some sync thing that would randomly wake up. Went into developer options and limited background processes and it basically fixed it. Android and DJI Fly have always had kind of a rocky relationship lol.

Also worth checking if you have wifi calling enabled, that can interfere more than people think, espcially in areas with spotty cell coverage where the phone is constantly hunting for signal.

yeah the last two or three DJI Fly updates have been a mess for a lot of Android users, there's a whole thread about it on the DJI forums too. Some people are rolling back to older versions but that's kind of a pain. If you have access to an iPhone even just to test it might be worth trying to rule out whether it's the app build or something with your specific phone.