In a perfect world, there would be no need for any mobile crash reporting software. Alas, we live in a gloriously messy and imperfect world where mobile apps crash incessantly, often in unexpected or unanticipated ways.
The best mobile app crash reporting tools use custom workflows, real-time alerting, reporting, and other strategic methods to keep you on top of debilitating errors and crashes. The best defense matters—a lot—because staying ahead of app errors, crashes, and other performance issues is critical to delivering exceptional user experiences.
Why Mobile Apps Crash
Apps crash for all sorts of reasons, but one of the most common is scalability.
Let’s say you’ve earned quite the reputation for your double chocolate chip cookies, and making them for friends and family brings you—and them—great joy. One day you enter these tasty delights in your local cookie-baking contest, win the blue ribbon, and are featured on the local news.
Suddenly, everyone in town wants a bite of the action, and what was once a manageable task is turning into a baker’s nightmare. A dozen cookies here or there is one thing, but simultaneously turning out hundreds or thousands of cookies is something else. Before you know it, you can’t keep up with the demand and the entire whole endeavor crumbles.
Ideally, things like an app’s scalability are addressed in the planning and design process, but that isn’t always as easy as it sounds. It’s challenging to predict how many people might use an app at any given time. In an effort to launch quickly and cost-effectively, you might underestimate the number of users required.
Other reasons mobile apps crash include:
- Inadequate testing on real mobile devices.
- Memory efficiency issues.
- Lack of cross-platform testing.
- Loss of traditional software life cycles(not developing it correctly)
Error-monitoring software can give you detailed insights and solutions that help prevent many app crashes from happening.
Why Developers and Product Managers Need Mobile Crash Reporting Software
Everyone wants their app to:
- Earn high ratings and great reviews on the App Store or Play Store.
- Boost user retention rates.
- Increase user engagement.
The average crash rate for mobile apps is two percent per user. That sounds great until you learn that the ideal app crash rate is less than one percent. Unfortunately, that two percent figure can have an adverse impact on user experience. In fact, multiple studies show that people hate when apps crash so much so that up to 80% of them will uninstall an app that crashes three times or even less.
Whether your app is designed for consumer or in-house use, disappointing users is a quick road to abandonment. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the best mobile app crash reporting tools available.
Android vs. iOS Crash Reporting Software
One primary reason for mobile app crashes is the proliferation of iOS and Android operating systems. With each new update, app developers are forced to test apps on more of these platforms. The primary difference between Android and iOS crash reporting software is the type of crashes they track:
- Typical iOS crash causes include missing frameworks, memory access issues, and Swift runtime errors.
- Common reasons Android apps crash ar; null values or empty strings, complex multithreaded interactions, and invalid API arguments.
No matter which operating system you’re dealing with, many of these causes can be subtle and even difficult to uncover.
5 Best Mobile Crash Reporting Software
#1: Firebase Crashlytics
Acquired by Google in 2017, Crashlytics is a mobile analytics tool that helps developers identify the exact line of code that an app crashes on. It provides granular insight into mobile app performance and user experience and works in real-time, so engineers can reduce the amount of time it takes to find and resolve issues.
Ideal for Android and iOS apps, the tool makes for seamless bug tracking and project management. It also easily integrates with macOS, watchOS, and tvOS apps. Curated crash reports highlight critical issues and provide contextual information developers can use to increase stability.
#2: UXCam
The UXCam platform is an all-in-one mobile app analytics tool that helps businesses deliver the perfect app experience for their users. The cloud-based solution’s lightweight crash analytics feature can be implemented in minutes and allows engineers to easily stay on top of crashes and bugs. Developers can match crashes to sessions and replay them to get a crash’s full picture, and custom alerts let them track crashes in real time.
UXCam is used by global companies like Nissan and NBC for iOS, Android, HTML5, and Mobile Web platforms.
#3: BugSnag
Offering rich, end-to-end error reporting and analytics that reproduce and fix errors with speed and precision, BugSnag supports open-source libraries for more than 50 platforms. The platform of choice for companies like Lyft, Yelp, and Chime, it’s equally effective for Android and iOS apps.
Developers and engineers can use the software to innovate faster, prioritize bugs in order of their impact on app stability, and increase productivity by spending less time on reproducing and fixing errors. They also appreciate the way BugSnag creates an ownership mentality by allowing them to see the effects of their coding proactively.
#4: Raygun
A cloud-based bug tracking application, Raygun provides instant visibility into the quality and performance of mobile apps. Equally suitable for large organizations and SMBs across various industries, it offers crash reporting, user tracking and monitoring, deployment tracking, and integrations with other software.
Developers can use Raygun to identify where users encounter errors, performance issues, or crashes. And its workflow management feature helps organize issue resolution. The preferred platform of Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Target, it offers first-class support for all major languages and frameworks.
#5: Rollbar
Android,iOS, and React Native development teams that want to discover, predict, and resolve app errors in real-time can use Rollbar’s error monitoring platform to alert them of problems within their code. Easy to set up, the tool supports all major languages, including Ruby, PHP, and node.js. It also tells developers where the code was broken and why it broke in the first place.
Along with Crashlytics and Rollbar, other options for hybrid frameworks like ReactNative and Flutter include Bugfender and Instabug.
Cost of Mobile Crash Reporting Software
Choosing the right app crash reporting tool is challenging due to rising costs relative to how much data and insight a product provides. Most products offer no-cost tier pricing plans, but as with everything else, you get what you pay for.
No matter how you slice it, though, compared to the costs associated with additional development and user abandonment, the expense of mobile crash reporting software is indeed a bargain. Ultimately, great mobile crash reporting software strengthens your app development and can make your apps rise to the top via positive reviews and happy users.Ready to learn more? Get in touch to schedule a meeting.