Adding crashlytics to CanZE

I have written quite often about our efforts to push back on crashes and ANRs (unresponsive screens). Up until now, and including the latest 1.49 release, our major tool for that has been the Google Play store. If enabled, your phone reports crashes and their call stack back to Google, where it is stripped from user identification and aggregated in our Play Store console. It works well, but it can give a massively false sense of comfort to the developers.

While not fully decided yet, we are implementing a Google product called “crashlytics” which goes a step further. When implemented, the crash reporting

• is done by CanZE, not by Android
• is still stripped from user identification
• reports all crashes, not just the ones enabled in Android
• can contain more information, such as the state of the application instead of just the call stack. This later works by the app saving some information to crashlytics. If the app runs fine, that info is discarded. If it crashes, it is send to the backend database together with the other crash info.
• is presented to us in a comprehensive console, with tons of filters, sorting, tagging.

We’ve read posts where applications reported tens to even hundreds of times more crashes than those coming back to the Play store and thus stayed under the radar. Of course we hope and think that this is not the case for CanZE, but we want you to have a trouble free experience.

What will you notice? Nothing at all. But be assured if/once implemented that every single crash will be reported and looked at.

As a test, this is now in the Open Beta channel.