What we aim for here @Bugsense is to provide our users with the best experience when dealing with this annoying part of application development that is “tracking bugs”. A question that we frequently get asked is:

“Why use a third-party service, when Apple provides developers with its own solution for tracking application crashes?”

As a matter of fact, the two services are very different as to what they offer. I am going to show you how the tools that Bugsense offers are significantly better than Apple’s offerings when it comes to remote crash reporting.

Apple provides developers with a subsection in iTunes Connect for each published app, where it shows the crash reports collected by the OS and presents them to users in the form of a zip package, containing a few individual reports as .crash files that can be opened by Mac OS X. If you visit the page in iTunes Connect, you can see that it is really minimal and could be what developers mostly want to profile their app’s issues, including Most Frequent Crashes, Timeouts and Memory issues.

While not detailed, this would be a great help to most developers if it worked. But after using it for a couple of published apps, I came to realise that unfortunately it misrepresents the situation with crashes. It often reports no crashes for applications I know have bugs. For applications where it does report some crashes, they seem to be random instead of the ones that occur more often.

Another thing Apple lacks is symbolication. Errors are not symbolicated on the server, which means the developers have to make sure they keep their dSYMs in their development computer so that they can be symbolicated when downloaded. Then - of course - they have to symbolicate them manually, one-by-one.





With Bugsense on the other hand, you can see all of your application’s crashes, reported in real time! In addition, we offer a load of extra features that will help you debug your application faster and more efficiently. Some of them are:

Grouping of similar crashes , know which are the bugs that happen more often, and in which version they appeared for the first time.

Filtering by devices/iOS versions/time period and much more!

Symbolication , both “on device” and “server side”, enabling developers to easily find the line of code that causes the crash, without manual user input.

Tagging of crashes as Resolved , so you know which ones you don’t have to worry about.

JIRA integration creates new tasks for you when a crash happens lots of times in your application.

Email notifications when new bugs occur.

If you are an iOS application developer, I invite you to use our plugin (for free!) and see for yourself what Bugsense can do for you. Start here and if you need more information or assistance with integrating it, feel free to contact me at ios@bugsense.com.





-John