If been looking around the web and can't seem to find any good solutions to sending allowing your user to submit bug reports from your iPhone app.
How do you handle crashes and exceptions?
Do you send the error user-data to a server,
grab a log file from somewhere and attach,
or do you ignore it and pretend it never happened?
Anybody got any experience with this?
Update
I am aware of how to prepare you software testing it with Static Analysis, Leak Detection, User Testing etc.
But errors might still happen when a user (mis)using my software. Always assume your user is trying to break your software.
What I want to figure out is how (I, or rather the app) can provide me with useful data when/if errors happen. As they do even in top quality products – like my own ofc. :)
I'm looking anyone that has experience with allowing the use to send error reports, stack traces, logs etc. to see how they handle the problem.
Some people use built-in analytics like Flurry which will post exception data to Flurry's website which you can review later.
Also, Apple has a "crash log" reporting area on iTunes Connect, but I'm not sure if it works since I've yet to see something come through and I kinda doubt each and every person has run my apps flawlessly. Not saying I write poor code (hopefully), but not every device is created equal either so I have to imagine it has crashed at least ONCE. There's always the option of logging and sending to a server later though.
Most of the time though, if you give users your e-mail address within the app itself (like on an instructions or about screen), they will e-mail me about any issues. That's a little bit nicer since it gives you a chance to correct the issue before they hit the review forms on iTunes.
You can also try BugSense. It's free, realtime, error reporting for iOS
PS: I am one of the founders.
Crashes most of the time comes with problems of memory management. To test memory leaks and find in your code on to what areas you were leaking a memory. Use the Instruments if your using XCode.
In your XCode go to Run -> Run with performance tool -> Leaks.
You can check everything here when it comes to memory allocations.
Note: To avoid crashes, make sure you released objects correctly and check your scheduled timers as well.
Regards,
ZaldzBugz
Related
Our apps are live on the app store.
I wish to recognise crashes of out of memory that some users are getting.
I understand there is no way to 100% recognise an out of memory crash.
Is there any way to recognise these crashes(with a pretty large probability) by doing some logic in the applicationDidReceiveMemoryWarning? (I am not talking about finding it in xcode during development time, i am talking about code that will recognise the out of memory crash from actual users and will log something to file)
While I was looking for any service or library that give me OOM tracking, I could only find this article from Facebook engineering:
https://code.facebook.com/posts/1146930688654547/reducing-fooms-in-the-facebook-ios-app/
The idea is to deduce the reason why the app needs to be launch, checking different aspects (like if the app was at background, if there is an app/OS update,...).
Discarding all the other possible reason that can force the previous app exit, you can know if the reason is a background out of memory or a foreground out of memory.
It would be nice to have a library that implements the Facebook article procedure. But nowadays I couldn't find any, probably there is some reason that make this difficult or may be impossible to add it as an sdk.
If anyone knows any service, please share it with everyone with a comment or a new answer.
Edit:
I have discovered this github (https://github.com/jflinter/JRFMemoryNoodler) with an implementation of the Facebook post procedure. I haven't tried yet, but we will deploy it in our apps to try it.
Look out for the applicationWillTerminate message in your app delegate. This is called if you app is terminated by the system (due to e.g. low memory), but not if the user leaves the app in the usual way by pressing the home key. Note: if your app is in the background and memory runs out, your app gets killed without any messages being sent to it.
YMMV, especially with older versions of iOS, and it's worth researching to ensure that the above is accurate.
The images at this blog post are quite informative (although slightly dated).
For more info, see How to know whether app is terminated by user or iOS (after 10min background)
Firstly Analyse your application by clicking on the Product at the top menu bar of your Xcode and click on Analyse section it will show you the number of leaks on in the application and can take you to the place where leaks occurred. This is how you can find the memory leak and rectify it.
Secondly it above does not worked then see to the view controller where crash occurred and check whether you have left any object to release.
Hope this might help you to resolve your problem.
I'm planning to release a new app in the future.
I have a custom logging function which logs some application data (not crashes) into a file (location manager state, app foreground-background transitions, main actions...). These logs helped me a lot to debug problems which were app-related, but not causing a crash. Until now these were in the documents directory (shared in iTunes) and the testers sent them to me after they saw some incorrect behaviors, however I don't want to share them anymore because this directory contains the app's database too.
I'd like to obtain these logs even when the app will be on App Store, but I don't know how this should be done. As I wrote, it is a new app and even after the test phase may exist minor bugs. I know that the users can report problems in iTunes or on the Dev site, but without a detailed scenario or log it is really hard to correct a bug. Should I make some kind of in-app bug report functionality (even if this creates a wrong user impression) ? How is this usually handled ?
Edit1 : I'd want these logs only if the user thinks something went wrong and should be analyzed, otherwise I don't really need them. I think some kind of user action is needed to confirm that something isn't working as intended, that's why I asked about making a functionality ( like the "Report a problem" in the Maps App ).
Thanks
If your app is gonna crash, don't submit it to AppStore because more likely it will be refused.
I don't know your app but usually logging slow down things. But if you really want logging I would suggest you to first find out if application crashed. For instance in your appDelegate when the app is terminated without problems set some NSUserDefaults value like closedSuccesfully=YES. Just after you start app set closedSuccesfully=NO, but if it was set to NO before it means your app crashed last time. In that case you could grab your previous logs and try to send them to your server via http post message. On your server there might be very simple php script to get that data. That way it will be automated and your users wouldn't have to do anything and you would get all crashes even these not reported.
One of my apps is in the appstore and I got a call from one of our clients saying a specific feature in the application is consitently causing the app to crash. However, I don't see any logs in iTunes Connect rightnow. Is there a delay between the app crashing and the log being submitted? If so, how long does it usually take?
Thanks,
Teja.
You'd be better asking them to send you crash reports directly. If they sync their handset using iTunes there will be a copy on their PC/Mac.
Unfortunately it seems that people are syncing their phones less and less often. (Which means they never make it into iTC.) Also, not all of them make it into iTC. Apple aggregate them but there also appears to be some level of filtering. What they do is not documented.
This blog explains what I ended up doing with my apps.
You should use a service like Crittercism - They give you real-time crash reports. You could also use something open-source like PLCrashReporter if you want to implement the server yourself.
The delay really depends on how long it takes before the user syncs their device with iTunes. I believe after that it's pretty quick.
Also it's worth noting that iTunes Connect needs a few crash reports before it displays them.
Some users reported there are bugs when run my app on their device.
Is it there a way to get the crash log that occurs on users' device?
Or is there any solution to catch all crash log for cocoa touch?
Welcome any comment
If you want to reduce the amount of effort users need to go to, something like PLCrashReporter is quite good (I remember seeing a handy wrapper around it recently but I lost the URL).
The most common chrash logs are available through itunesconnect.
Also, the crash logs get synchronized to the Mac or PC. Maybe not the latest news, but this link should get you going: http://aplus.rs/apple/how-to-find-crash-logs-for-iphone-applications-on-mac-vista-and-xp/
You can check out apphance (http://apphance.com). It provides remote access to a test user device including logs written by developer, crash logs and more....
Disclaimer : I am CTO of company which created apphance and co-creator of it.
I use QuincyKit and really like it. It's free, and easy to install on your server.
If you want a hosted solution, I have heard a lot of praises for Crashlytics.com, but did not personally tested it (commercial product).
And forget iTunes Connect if you care about fixing all crashes. Often, you won't see crash happening in there (might be because users do not sync and many other reasons).
Currently I'm testing an app that I've written with ios 4. I've spent a good bit of time looking for memory leaks and that side of things seems o.k.
I have a problem where the app seems to "randomly" quit after going from one view to another. Sometimes this will happen after a minute or 2 and sometimes it won't happen at all. Because of this it's really very difficult to determine where the flaw in my application is and under what circumstances because my observations of whats going on is subjective. Also it can get very annoying very quickly sitting there hitting buttons until something happens and then trying to remember the sequence of your actions.
What would be a good method to hunt down the cause of this seemingly randomly occurring problem?
For example,
I remember speaking with QA engineer before and he spoke of tools that he used to automate a user using an application. He'd leave it running over night and then in the morning he could examine what combination of user actions and under what circumstances a problem occurred.
Are there such tools available for testing iphone applications? Ideally what I'd like to see is a report of
action a
action b
action c
= everything ok.
action a
action c
action b
= there was a problem.
There's also fonemonkey: http://www.gorillalogic.com/fonemonkey
As for random crashes... I am tester, not developer, and random crashes are usually one of the topics I examine more thoroughly on every iphone app. My favorite scenarios are: leave the phone for 2 min, for 10 min, and switch apps (on iOS 4). In all cases it's better to use a real phone (and the older the better), not a simulator (some crashes never happen on simulator). Commonly nested views are affected (e.g. get to some view, let phone sleep, click "Back" button to return to previous view - crash). Usually developers say that incorrect retain / release, autorelease while another object holds pointer, and other memory issues are to blame. Also Device Logs (which will have crash report) usually can pinpoint problem pretty accurately.
Hey.
Instruments by Apple. Apple reference.
Instruments has its limitations and drawbacks, but just try it. It may be confusing at the begging so try to follow tutorial, or some other.
Check out running the app with zombies enabled. Also, instruments in Xcode is very helpful.