Top App Crash Reporting Tools

February 22, 2022

Shubhangi Choudhary

Marketing Manager @ Radiansys

App crashes can harm the sleekest user experiences as they are an instant turn-off for app consumers. Needless to say, the success of any app in today’s market depends upon the level of its stability and flawlessness. Among the plethora of issues harming app performance, app crashes prove to be the most lethal ones, causing the majority of app uninstalls.

Crashes can truly be the worst nightmare of app developers as they cause an unexpected and abrupt shutdown of apps. There could be multiple reasons behind app crashes including poor memory, inefficient app testing, and more. The stability and quality of any app are often judged by the frequency of errors and crashes it experiences. When your mobile app crashes, it’s a bad user experience. But it’s also a great opportunity to fix bugs and improve the app.

App crash reporting tools can help you learn more about app crashes so you can fix them quickly. They also give you insights into how your app is performing so you can make data-driven decisions about how to improve it.

There are a lot of crash reporting tools out there, and it can be hard to know which one to use. In this article, we'll be taking a deep dive into some of the best app crash reporting tools on the market and help you with how to choose the right tool for your needs too

Top 7 app crash reporting tools

Here is a list of some of the best-performing app crash reporting tools presently available in the market.

Instabug

When talking about innovation-led app crash reporting tools, Instabug deserves the first mention. Ever since its release in 2013, Instabug has continued to gain fame due to its best app crash troubleshooting features. It has been the choice of top companies like Yahoo and PayPal that speaks of its quality work. Instabug puts forward creatively unique ways of reporting crashes that are also very simple to utilize.

Customer communication is the prime way Instabug uses for crash reporting. Developers can create and use a two-way communication bridge for live chatting with the affected users. The tool just requires the app user to shake their mobile device upon the occurrence of a crash. It then captures a screenshot instantly and annotates the image. Alongside, it also allows the developers to gather info and feedback from the targets users related to the bug. Thus, it can produce more metadata that directly paces up the speed of debugging. It helps the developers take precise actions on handling the crash.

Another way Instabug works on crash reporting is by gathering feedback from beta testers. It seeks information on bugs through screen recordings, annotations, voice reports, screenshots, etc. left by the testing users.

Instabug also produces comprehensive crash reports and sometimes even clubs similar crashes in separate reports. The latter helps in understanding the severity level and frequency of the crashes. The crash analysis reports include information on apps’ running environment, stack trace, etc. You can also find other features like console logs, symbolical stack traces, and tips on crash reproduction. The tool also produces detailed charts on the issues that give way to trend analysis and bug predictions.

It is not a free tool but there are affordable plans to choose from that are totally worth the services they offer.

Crashlytics

Closely associated with Google’s Firebase software, Crashlytics goes a step further with its cloud-based app crash reporting services. It is a great tool to get an impression of the apps’ health. If you wish to have quicker results at finding and fixing crashes so that you can focus more on app development, then Crashlytics is the tool to use. It has been a top choice of small enterprises and freelancing developers majorly as it is free and can be used at variable scales.

The strength of Crashlytics is its comprehensive and customizable crash report. It covers a detailed analysis of the crash incidence including the cause along with useful tips on how to fix it. You can find crucial information related to the crash like battery status, sensors, OS details, running process, wi-fi network, etc. Further, the tool analyses the crash impact on app users by counting the total instance of each crash and assigning them an impact level consequently. The precision in error reporting is such that the exact part of code is highlighted that has gone problematic. Lastly, it prioritizes the crashes as per their impact level to allow developers to fix them accordingly.

Alongside, Crashlytics also notifies beforehand about the occurrence of new issues or changes in the status of existing issues. This proves helpful for the developers in preparing for handling or preventing crashes.

This tool facilitates multi-platform compatibility including both iOS and Android. It also provides a detailed SDK that makes the tool very easily integrable. It also allows seamless integration with different tools including Jira, Slack, and others that proves beneficial for workflow management and optimization. Crashlytics can also utilize other features of Firebase like in-app messaging to contact the users post-crash immediately.

Countly

Making its way through the most competent app crash reporting tools, Countly comes up with proficient crash reporting features along with powerful analytics tools. It’s an open-source web and mobile analytics platform that tracks down both fatal and non-fatal issues to facilitate full app health.

The main strength of Countly is a real-time infrastructure that generates the latest insights on improving app stability. It lists down the exact errors that have been causing the crash incidences. This is combined with carefully segmented analytics that traces the pattern of such errors along with the section of users impacted by the crashes. The segments contain information about the device, OS, carrier, etc., whichever underwent the crash. Ultimately, the tool helps developers with complete stack traces and customized log info to understand the error trends and fix them accordingly.

You can add crash reporting features to this tool with the help of dedicated plugins. There are two such plugins available- Crashes and Errors (comes in both free and enterprise edition) and Symbolication (comes in enterprise edition only). The first plugin facilitates automatic grouping of crash reports, report customization with custom filters, separate crash analysis, and report sharing. The next plugin provides deeper crash analysis with its crash symbolication support that allows tracing the source code of the crash too.

Bugsnag

Leveling up app crash reporting, Bugsnag offers many unique features that many other high-ranking tools don’t. It is a complete open-source monitoring solution that helps app owners save their app ratings by avoiding and fixing crashes on time. Bugsnag supports more than 50 platforms including Android, iOS, Unity, React Native, Swift, etc.

Crash reporting with Bugsnag is a great move since the tool generates all the related key data. The crash reports present precisely crafted error groups, filtered, and sorted data. This includes device data, accessible stack traces, and automatic breadcrumbs. Developers can isolate crash searches by environments, customer segments, and even bookmark these searches to use later. It further helps in precise error cause diagnosing and swifter error reproduction that leads to faster crash fixing. The tool notifies the developers of the fixed and pending errors in real-time.

Bugsnag takes complete care of app stability by allowing developers to set app stability target levels for every release and get alerts accordingly. This data can be viewed on the release dashboard.

The tool also computes the error rates and related anomalies and further alerts on frequently troublesome codes. The breadcrumbs can be used to customize the error-diagnosing features of applications. Bugsnag performs even better with mobile integration and generates scalable results as the error volume increases. The tool is a great choice for smaller enterprises as it offers pay-per-user plans.

Raygun

For complete app crash monitoring and remedial, Raygun is one of the top choices. It has come out to be the favorite for iOS developers but provides crash reporting services for other platforms too. Raygun supports over 30 frameworks and languages making it a highly inclusive tool. It is being used by renowned companies like Microsoft, Coco-Cola, etc. that speaks for its top-notch services.

Raygun provides an unmatched crash report that includes an in-depth analysis of the app crash. It provides data on the cause of the crash, monitors the latest crashes in real-time, checks the affected user group, analyzes the overall impact on user journeys, creates custom error groups. The report contains precise data that can help with crash replication including network, location, full stack traces, OS version, app version, exact crash location, device data, etc. It even has a real user monitoring feature that helps developers know the exact crash experienced users when used with the crash reporting features. This produces complete info on the user sessions experiencing app crashes.

This tool is the best choice for iOS app crash reporting due to its amazing features like an integrated dashboard, simple integrability, and fast data collection. It has a Raygun4Apple library that can be used for monitoring Swift and Objective-C apps both. Alongside, Raygun supports multi-tool integration that allows the transfer and sharing of app crash data with other platforms. This means you can get real-time and instant notifications on connected tools whenever a crash occurs. Raygun offers several plans for enterprises of different sizes to choose from and pay for their exact requirement.

Hockeyapp

Designed and owned by the supreme tech player Microsoft, Hockeyapp is one of the top app crash reporting tools in the developer community. It is a widely trusted software with features speaking of the excellence forwarded by Microsoft. The company is also planning to launch the next-gen version of this tool which will also be closely associated with the software Visual Studio Mobile Center.

HockeyApp is essentially an open-source SDK that supports multiple platforms including Android, iOS, Windows, etc. The tool is primarily deployed for testing the initial versions of iOS apps but has comprehensive features for other platforms too. Hockeyapp can be used for free for crash reporting for a maximum of two apps. The free version goes by the name Hockeykit. However, you can choose between different plans available for diagnosing a greater number of apps.

This tool specializes in crash reporting over and above all. It allows the developers to receive crash reports after users’ feedback of the crash or automatically after the crash occurs. These crash reports are a great solution for the analytical requirements of developers. They include stack traces along with precise data of the methods, line numbers, and names that help exact spotting of the errors. Alongside, the reports also contain error groups to help developers with error trends. The reports are symbolicated and stored on the servers of HockeyApp. Uniquely, this tool also allows developers to add log files or metadata to the reports for improved error analysis results.

The only drawback of HockeyApp is that it is relatively larger along with being on the pricier side.

Appsee

Another greatly versatile platform is Appsee which does so much more than just app crash reporting. Speaking of crash analysis, it offers all the general monitoring and reporting services along with some very unique features. It is a light app analytics SDK that supports multiple platforms including Android, iOS, Unity, Cocos2d, etc.

Appsee has been primarily famous for its UI boosting capabilities including the unique touch heatmaps. This feature helps developers in tracking the user engagements with the app by recording all the gestures made by the user while operating the app. The best feature of Appsee is crash video recording that involves real-time capturing of the events that led to the app crashes. This ultimately helps the developers in knowing the exact reasons for the crashes.

It is very easy to integrate Appsee with the apps using just a single line of code. Once it is done, the tool starts collecting the crash and user data instantly. Appsee generates detailed visual crash reports that make it super easy for all developers to understand the information. They contain symbolicated stack traces that make the exact source code of the crash identifiable.

Appsee supports integration with many popular workflow management platforms including Slack, JIRA, Trello, etc. The tool offers a free trial for 14 days and free usage for the first app. For monitoring more apps, there are several paid plans available on their website.

How do the app crash reporting tools help?

If you’ve ever had to write a bug report, you’re familiar with the pain points: a long list of steps to reproduce the bug, a series of vague text descriptions of what happened, no screenshots or videos to provide context, and a request for your system specs. It’s a time-consuming and frustrating experience.

To save everyone from the hassles of this process, the crash reporting tools come to the rescue. Now, what do these tools do?

• Diagnose apps of any issues and generate alerts for them
• Produce an accessible crash log
• Collect the crash data including causal events, user actions, etc.
• Possess tools and means that facilitate app health monitoring

The crash data collected by the tool is the most important part of the bug fixing process. Generally, it includes the following components:

• Traces- In most of the crash instances, a stacktrace is generated which gives an idea about the point of occurrence and symptom of the crash. This helps in the preliminary investigation of the app crash.
• Logs- These provide a complete picture of what led to the app crash and contain all the errors and unexpected events responsible for the latter.
• Environment- The tools also collect data regarding the device or environment in which the crash occurred. This includes info like device model, OS version, app version, etc.
• Navigation- There is no single navigation route that users follow while using any app. Here, the crash reporting tools find out the exact path taken by the user to put light on the crash cause.

How to choose the right app crash reporting tool?

Choosing the right app crash reporting tool can be difficult. You’re bound to hear about a tool that can provide you with tons of data, but it comes at a cost. Most of these tools have similar core characteristics like multi-platform integrations, producing traces, obtaining environment info, and so on. Thus, what will actually help you pick the real gem include app reporting features, deployment ease, and other advanced features.

Let us provide you a checklist for the same:

• Before anything, a proper assessment of your business goals and app architecture is a must to collate the best options.
• The tool must support several important integrations along with possessing important features like those of crash grouping, report customizations, etc. You can also lookout for the unique features that some tools offer.
• Most importantly, you need to make sure your app’s crash data is being collected and made actionable.
• Most app crash reporting tools today are free-to-use, but some offer a free trial, so it’s worth checking if they have one.

Ironically, errors are an inevitable reality associated with app development. The challenges of the field are constantly increasing with the world of mobile app development receiving newer guests. With more and advanced OS versions and devices entering the cosplay, crash reporting is becoming an even stricter necessity.

Having a great app crash reporting tool can strengthen your software development infrastructure significantly. When used with manual device testing, you can make your apps even better without negative reviews and annoyed users. We hope the above tools will help you produce great apps and gain more customers.

Thanks for reading!