With the current Bottom navigation view and the navigation compose artifact, once i leave the application and come back to it, the navigation is restarted, any workaround or I'm missing something?

If you're not persisting your state, the OS might kill your process at any time. This might be why.

What does 'leave the application and come back to it' mean? Hitting the system back button and then re-launching the app? That is supposed to clear any state. Hitting the Home button and then re-launching the app? That should keep your state already

When i leave my app, minimise it, (onPause/onStop) scenario, when i reopen it from recents the latest screen i opened (navigated to) isn't remembered.

How are you remembering your current tab state? You might want to use

rememberSaveable

instead of

remember

to make sure it survives fragment/activity recreations in case the system feels like killing and restoring them.

All i'm using is rememberNavController extension function provided by Compose