Introducing enhanced dSYM tools: stay on top of stability

Posted by Jason St. Pierre on

Missing crashes is frustrating, but not knowing the cause is even worse. App users have low tolerance for buggy apps, which is why stable apps retain more engaged users.

When we launched Crashlytics four years ago, we set out to solve the problem of mobile crash reporting through an easy to use, automated experience. We invested in tools that automated the dSYMs upload process for iOS apps, so you never had to worry about missing a crash.

As the mobile ecosystem evolves, there are complex situations (i.e., Bitcode support or the use of dynamic libraries) that can prevent us from locating the right dSYM to symbolicate your crashes. That's why today, we're excited to unveil our new command line dSYM uploader. Now, you'll never miss a crash report and you'll also have more transparency and the highest quality crash data — even in the most complex situations!

 

Real-time alerts when crashes can’t be processed

It isn’t always obvious when you’re impacted by a symbolication issue. Now, any crash that is missing a dSYM will immediately prompt a banner alert in your Crashlytics dashboard. We’ll even show you the aggregate number of unsymbolicated crashes and the UUIDs of the missing dSYMs, meaning you’ll never waste time guessing which ones to upload.

 

More control over dSYM uploads

dSYMs are essential for crash reporting because they allow us to group crashes into larger issues, isolate the root cause of the error, and provide context around its severity. We continue to invest in flexible, yet powerful tools, that help you automate this process since we know how critical the retrieval and submission of dSYMs is to your stability insight.

That’s why we built upload-symbols, a command line tool, written in Swift, that ships within the Fabric Mac app and our Fabric CocoaPod. It’s incredibly scripting-friendly - give it a try yourself!

 

Automate with fastlane and skip iTunes connect

When you submit iOS apps to the App Store with Bitcode enabled, your app gets recompiled on Apple’s servers. This means Crashlytics doesn’t have access to the debug information it needs to symbolicate your crashes. Luckily, you do, via a dSYM download facility in Xcode.

Instead of manually downloading these files from Xcode and submitting them to Crashlytics, you can use fastlane to automate this tedious process after every release.

Learn more about how to save time by setting up fastlane automation.

Crashlytics_dSYM_uploader_with_fastlane

 

Generous crash reprocessing window for peace of mind

Don’t have time to upload missing dSYMs right away? No problem. We know you’re busy so we’ll hold onto unprocessed crash reports for seven days. Once we receive the missing dSYMs, we’ll process the unsymbolicated crashes. Rest assured, you won’t lose any of the information you need to solve the most critical issues.

 

Highest crash reporting quality

We built our dSYM uploader to stay ahead of the curve. Even though managing debug symbols is getting more complicated, we’ve got you covered with our new Crashlytics updates.

In addition to increased transparency on the number of unsymbolicated crashes and missing dSYMs, we’re now giving you more control over uploading them. And with the power of fastlane, we’ve made the dSYM management as smooth and hassle-free as possible for developers that take advantage of Bitcode. Best of all, our seven-day crash reprocessing window means you don’t need to drop what you’re doing to find a missing dSYM - you have time to retrieve them without risking crash data loss.

Try our new dSYM uploader to get even more insight into your crashes and become the master of your app’s stability. If you have more ideas for how we can make dSYM processing even better, we’re all ears!

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!