Those Pesky Crashes

Unless you have a dedicated team of testers working with you, it’s pretty easy to publish an app with bugs in it. Hopefully, the majority of your scenarios work because you’ve tried them out (that is assuming, of course, that you are not publishing titles for a device you’ve never seen - hello, iPad!). However, there is always some weird combination of user input you haven’t thought of that, apparently, everyone else has.

We’ve all been there - you write an app and a friend of yours wants to take a look. You reluctantly give up possession of your precious little baby and cringe in the background as your friend taps on all the wrong places. Three seconds later, he returns the device to you with your app all locked up or, better yet, not running at all. You and your friend never talk again.

Okay, so maybe that’s just me. However, my point is that even in these scenarios, you are pretty safe. Apart from losing a friendship or two, you can go home, try to recreate some of the issues, and fix the bugs you find along the way.

When you ship, however, chasing crashes becomes much more difficult. Apart from getting the occasional “The app crashes and it sucks! Don’t buy it” review, you don’t get much information about how your app performs. You may not even know that it crashes at all; not unless you look at Apple’s iTunes Connect portal in a little more detail.

I’ve just submitted an update for Doodle Blast! today and discovered this handy little button hiding underneath the application details:

Clicking on it, you get a nice little summary of what, if any, crashed have been reported:

Besides being told about the crashes, you can download a .crash file, which magically opens up on your machine and shows you the full stack trace of your app at the time of the crash.

That’s pretty cool! I’ve worked on a variety of platforms where you might get some core dumps but, no matter how hard you try, you can never get your hands on the actual stack trace. Either your symbols are too old, or they are from the wrong build, or you just didn’t clap your hands three times before throwing some salt over your shoulder. Whatever the case, the bottom line is that getting some useful information out of a crash log is always a challenge.

This is not the case here. You just need to know that these crash logs are available. I didn’t… until now. And, sadly, it turns out that Doodle Blast! crashes every now and then. Curious, I looked at the downloaded .crash log and discovered that if you tap on the Doodle Blast! title text in the main menu, bad things happen. Don’t do it, kids. You’ve been warned. Fix coming up in the next update…