CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ios
Nerrolken
Nerrolken

Reputation: 2005

Diagnosing non-reproduceable bugs?

I've got a very basic, but terribly important and potentially impossible question: how does one go about diagnosing a bug you can't reproduce?

Twice now, I've gotten emails from people asking about app-crashing bugs that I can't reproduce. Non-modified iPhones, current software, tried reinstalling and hard resets, etc. It crashes every time for them, and it works perfectly for me, (not to mention it got approved for the App Store in the first place so I'm clearly not the only one). I had always understood that the consistency of the devices was one of Apple's big selling points for developers, but that also makes it hard to pinpoint what's different about their device from mine...

So, aside from "just keep testing," is there a trick-of-the-trade among programmers for this sort of thing? Some function of the iPhone simulator that lets you test not just different screen sizes but different hardware configurations, etc? Or am I just out of luck, and stuck telling my customer "sorry, it works for me"?

Can anyone share their experiences or suggestions about this?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 388

Answers (4)

mjswan
mjswan

Reputation: 91

While the iTunes Connect crash reports can be helpful, the crash reporting services like Crittercism are more user-friendly and full-featured. Crittercism has been very helpful in tracking down infrequently-occurring crashes for my apps and can be used no-charge. (I have no association with Crittercism.)

Upvotes: 3

Daddy
Daddy

Reputation: 9035

It's important to keep your dsym files from each build & archive safe. You can use them to symbolicate crash reports, to see details of the crash. Users will have to opt in to submitting crash reports though. I think this is a feature of iTunesConnect.

Upvotes: 2

www.jensolsson.se
www.jensolsson.se

Reputation: 3073

In iTunes Connect you can access crash reports. These crash reports include call stacks that you can symbolicate and then you can see where it actually crashes.

Here is some good instructions for symbolicating: symbolicating-iphone-app-crash-reports

Upvotes: 2

Timothy Moose
Timothy Moose

Reputation: 9915

You should probably start by installing a crash reporting tool like Crashlytics. This may give you the clues you need or at least help you narrow down where to put additional crash logging.

Upvotes: 3

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