Crash Reporting Tools for iOS and Android

As app developers, we’re all familiar with app crashes and how much of a pain it can be to trace the cause that’s making your app crash. Crash reporting tools are a lifesaver in such cases. In this post we’ll be looking at some of the more popular crash reporting tools for iOS and Android that you can use in your app development efforts. There’s a variety of options available, comprising of both paid and free solutions. Let’s take a look.

Crashlytics

 First up there’s Crashlytics, an extremely popular and widely used library for crash reporting for iOS apps. Recently acquired by Twitter, Crashlytics keeps track of any and all crashes in your iOS app and automatically reports these to the server along with the reason(s) behind each crash. Crashlytics is extremely capable in this regard, as it can pin point the exact line of code that is causing the app to crash, along with providing the memory stack trace, so you can reproduce the crash using the same environment.

Crashlytics also sends instant emails to all stakeholders for every single crash, for each user, ensuring that no app crashing incident goes unnoticed. It also provides an easy to use dashboard view of the app, along with all the details of all crash incidents together with the date and time of their incidence.

Crashlytics not only reports crashes, it also provides an interface to keep track of them. For example, if a particular type of crash has been fixed in newer version of your app, you can mark it ‘fixed’ or ‘closed’ in the tool. Crashlytics will then ignore that type of crash on older versions of your app.

Crashlytics also provides detailed information on the device on which your app is running, which is very helpful when you need to know the exact environment to reproduce the issue(s). The device information provided by Crashlytics includes:

• Disk space
• RAM
• OS version
• Orientation
• Battery status
• Whether the device is jail broken or not

Crashlytics supports integration with third party tools like Campfire, JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, Redmine and Pager Duty. The only drawback of Crashlytics is that it doesn’t support app distribution management capabilities.

Google Analytics

 Another popular choice in the various crash reporting tools for iOS and Android available is Google Analytics, which recently added crash & exception reporting capabilities to the Google Analytics iOS SDK. The crash reporting features supported by the Google Analytics iOS SDK include:

• Stack trace for each crash
• A bird’s eye view of app crashes
• Integration with normal app events and app crash reporting with a focus on tracking the cause(s) of app crashes and their associated cost and other parameters

Crittercism

Next in the list of crash reporting tools for iOS and Android is Crittercism, a tool that provides multi-platform (iOS, Android, HTML5, and Windows 8) support. Crittercism also provides memory stack trace capabilities but since it supports multiple platforms, it’s not able to provide as much detail and support as some of the other crash reporting tools out there.

The only drawback with Crittercism is its UI, as it doesn’t show you every detail about the app crash at first glance. For example, if you want to view the app version or contextual data, you have to navigate through the tabbed menu given in the middle of the page. So it’s a little hard to use.

Crittercism also supports integration with following third-party tools, such as HelpShift and Uservoice. It’s a paid app and is available in three pricing tiers: Basic, Premium and Enterprise

Bugsense

 Next we have Bugsense, another multi-platform, crash reporting tool for iOS, Android, HTML5 and Windows 8. It is not as full featured as other crash reporting tools in the sense that it offers crashing reporting in the form of a memory stack trace without symbolication. The user has to manually extract the the DYSM file and upload that file on the server in order to view the crash report with symbolication. It currently only supports integration with the JIRA bug tracking tool.

Bugsense is available in both free and paid versions. The paid version has the following pricing tiers – Indie, Plus and Enterprise

TestFlight

 TestFlight is an extremely popular crash reporting tool for iOS apps. Initially developed as a management tool for the distribution of beta releases of iOS apps, it now also supports crash reporting. Since crash reporting is relatively new feature in TestFlight, more features are expected to be added for this capability in the near future.

Similarly, we have HockeyApp and Sumbolon, which also offer similar crash reporting functionality.

Summing Up

As you can see, there are quite a few crash reporting tools for iOS and Android available in the market. Among all of them, we’ve found Crashlytics to be the best. Firstly because it’s free and comes with a ton of features and an extremely capable administrative back end. And also because it offers a fully automated reporting process, so all crash reports are automatically logged on the server, saving you from having to manually upload the DSYM files for each release.

References: http://www.raywenderlich.com/33669/overview-of-ios-crash-reporting-tools-part-1
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About Folio3

As a leading mobile app development company (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, HTML5 app development), Folio3 specializes in native app development services and cross platform mobile app development services for the iPhone and iPad. We also offer extensive mobile app testing and QA services. If you have a mobile app idea that you’d like to discuss please or would like to know more about our iPhone app development services, please Contact Us. Learn more about our iPhone, Android and Windows Phone app development services

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