Making your Android apps crash-proof

Image courtesy: Crittercism Website

Do you have an android app on the Play Store, and get lots of negative comments/feedback?


Most of the time, apps crash on the first interaction with the user. And that's the reason most users are frustrated of even downloading your app, and that's when most of the negative comments start pouring in.

Of course, you have to look for crashes everywhere in your app, but crashing on the first page itself, is a really really bad situation. When that happens, and the user leaves a bad comment, instead of sending you a support mail, you have no idea how to fix it. You have no idea about the user's device, and other important information that would help you in determining the problem, and fixing it. And if you continue having such a build even for a week on the store, that puts a dent on your overall app reviews. People generally look at the first few reviews, and make a decision based on that, whether to try your app or not.

I have had an app on the store for years now, which I didn't update for a long time. And finally, when I got the time to work on it again, I decided to integrate Crittercism SDK within my app, along with Google Analytics SDK.

The very first update with +Crittercism along with +Google Analytics , my inbox was flooded with crash reports. I was amazed at how many un-reported crashes my app had. I was living in the dark, as to what all problems users were having with my app. Crittercism logs had more information about the crashes than I could have asked for. They were pretty detailed, in terms of the user's device name, and OS versions, the version of the application, and a device snapshot (Memory/Storage) when the crash occurred.

After about a week, I made the next update, and this time, the crash notifications reduced dramatically, although the number of users and the average usage of my app went up. From this, I can guess that the users who are still using my app are a happy lot. And that makes me happy as well.

I would strongly recommend integrating such a live error reporting tool into your apps to get live feedback for your apps. Specifically for Crittercism, there are free and paid plans. Currently, I am on the free plan, and it gives me the almost everything that I need to know to fix those random crashes. With paid plans, you have more reporting, which I think I don't need right away. Receiving crash notifications is just the one part of Crittercism. They call this solution as a "Mobile Application Performance Management" solution. Rightly so?

Have you used Crittercism in your apps? Do you have anything to say?