A crash is a terminal error in an application that causes it to stop working. As crashes negatively impact user experience, it’s important to continuously monitor your application to detect them as they happen, so that you can find and resolve the underlying causes quickly.
Most mobile app crash reporting tools come with different functionalities, so you need to find the one that best fits your needs and developer workflow. Most of these tools also include error tracking and log analytics features you can use to understand your crashes in a more detailed way.
There are two ways to create a mobile application:
As a native mobile app developed in either the Objective-C or Swift programming language.
With a mobile development framework such as React Native, Xamarin, or Flutter.
Note, however, that not all crash reporting tools support every development tool, so always check the supported languages and platforms before signing up for a service.
Most mobile app crash reporting tools are SaaS (Software as a Service) applications hosted in the cloud and come with a graphical user interface so you can use them without much technical knowledge (however, you’ll still need to make sense of the crash reports themselves).
Adding a crash reporting tool to your mobile app development stack delivers many advantages. Here are the most important ones:
Better user experience
Once you can capture crashes in real time, your app will become more user-friendly. Some of these tools let you communicate with your users immediately after the crash happened, while others allow them to submit custom crash reports. Plus, if you’re constantly eliminating the underlying issues, your app will load faster, which improves the overall user experience.
Lower churn rate
The churn rate is the annual percentage of users who stop using your application. Statistically speaking, if fewer crashes happen, fewer users will uninstall your app. A lower churn rate also increases the efficiency of sales strategies such as upselling and in-app purchases, and therefore directly affects your bottom line.
Better developer experience
Developer experience (DX) can improve significantly if your technical team has access to a high-quality crash reporting tool because they get the context they need to find and solve issues that happen in production (these are usually not discovered during the development phase).
A proactive approach to error handling
A crash reporting tool lets you fix problems before they seriously impact your business. This is especially important in the mobile development industry, as users tend to uninstall apps that feel buggy incredibly fast.