Introducing Velocity Alerts

Posted by Jason St. Pierre on

Since the birth of Crashlytics, our passion has always been to help you fix the most prevalent issues quickly and painlessly. Just last month, we released badges to help you hone in on crashes that stand out against the rest.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Velocity Alerts: intelligent, proactive alerting on the most critical issues happening in your app. Now, you truly know when you need to take action right away.

 

Powered by the #1 mobile analytics solution

While our system already distills and prioritizes your crashes based on their impact, there was more we could do to make your life even easier. By combining your app’s crash data with usage analytics from Answers, our new Velocity Alerts enable you to triage unexpected, high-impact issues with minimal effort.

Now, once you’ve enabled Answers as part of Crashlytics, our system will proactively check to see if there is a statistically significant number of sessions that have ended due to a crash related to one issue on a particular build. If so, we'll let you know if that issue is a hot patch candidate and needs your attention immediately right on your dashboard. You’ll also get an email alert in your inbox as well as a push notification if you’re using the Fabric mobile app (Android support coming soon). With Crashlytics, you’ll never miss a critical bug!

While at it, we’ve also redesigned all of our notification emails so important information are even more clear and actionable.

We couldn’t be happier to release this so you can sit back, relax and just focus on building the best app. If you’re already using Crashlytics with Answers, Velocity Alerts are automatically enabled for you. If not, get started with Answers!

The Wait is Over: Launching Crashlytics for Android NDK

Posted by Hemal Shah on

When we launched Crashlytics for Android two years ago, we took on a challenge: fixing crashes within Android apps. Just recently, Crashlytics was named the top performance tool on Android by SourceDNA, the largest mobile app intelligence firm in the world. But we continued to listen to your feedback on what could be better. Your response: NDK support.

Since then, we’ve been heads down building out our NDK support in Labs. We’ve listened to your feedback and understood that getting insightful crash reports for NDK code is hard. You not only wanted deep, actionable reports to fix the most prevalent native crashes, but also something that would just work without a headache.

Today, we’re excited to announce our official support for NDK crash reporting!

Most powerful, yet lightweight

We’ve brought the best of our Java-based Android crash reporting to native code. We perform a deep analysis of each stack trace to identify the most important frames so you can see the exact line of code that caused the crash and quickly address the issue.

You’ll have access to the same deep information like devices, hardware, versions.  And now, you’ll spend less time finding and more time fixing your native crashes.

First-in-class installation

The last thing you want is a cumbersome setup or complex configuration just to get crash reporting for your NDK code. Before today, NDK crash reporting involved numerous steps: adding external files, jumping through repos, manually provisioning keys, etc. We’ve built our NDK support to be the opposite: it’s seamless and it’s intelligent.

If you’re already using Crashlytics, you won’t have to download any new plugins or build tools. Simply add a few lines of code within your Gradle or Ant-based project, and we'll do the rest. We’ll even pull in all the dependencies you need automatically.

Not building from a standard IDE? No worries. We'll auto-provision your keys and onboard your app from the command line, just as we do with our plugins. Now sit back and focus on the fun stuff, like coding the next killer app!

Don’t worry, your code is safe

Today, many crash reporting tools for NDK still rely on you uploading your unstripped binaries to generate symbol files server-side. This poses significant risk for your code, sending your secret sauce to third parties, not to mention wasting bandwidth by transmitting your full executable.

With Crashlytics NDK support, our build tools generate the needed symbols – completely client side – before uploading them to our servers. You’ll have total control over the upload process, and our symbol upload file is a fraction of the normal size, saving you tons of bandwidth.

Experience the power

Our official support for NDK is already trusted by many top apps in the Android Play Store:

We use Crashlytics daily to improve the quality in our apps: Path, Path Talk and Kong. NDK support by Crashlytics is one of the best tools on the market to find native errors which are not reported by any other tools.

- Dario Marcato,


A critical portion of the Rdio app relies on NDK. Thanks to Crashlytics, we now trust that we have the best tool on the market to monitor it properly.

- Sean Smith,


Integrating NDK Fabric support only took a few minutes and the payoff was huge! Now we can see exactly where we’re having crashes in our native code by function and line number.

- Dallin Dyer,


 

We’ll be rolling out NDK support over the next few days. Once you have access, you'll see a toggle at the top of our instructions page for Gradle and Ant. Simply toggle the button to the right to see how you can enable NDK support within your projects.

 

If you're already using Crashlytics, be sure to upgrade to the latest Crashlytics Kit on Fabric. If you're already on Fabric and you needed NDK support yesterday, give us a shout and we’ll try to get you into to our next batch! 

We can’t wait for you to try it and hear what you think we should tackle next :)