In an increasingly competitive app ecosystem, having a good user experience starts with ensuring your app is crash-free. One of the best ways to ensure your app is crash-free is to immediately know of any issues as they occur, and how to begin troubleshooting. Use Android vitals to identify areas of your app that are spiking in crashes and any issues with your app’s response rate, then use customized crash reports in Firebase Crashlytics to drill deeper into the root cause of the crash so that you can fix the problems.
Why it works
Identifying and prioritizing the most pervasive crashes will help you fix problems before they have a big impact on your users and your ratings and reviews. Getting more context about the events in your app that lead to crashes helps you quickly troubleshoot and reproduce crashes so your users can experience the best possible version of your app.
Features
- Android vitals: Review your app’s performance across a range of technical quality metrics including crash rate, ANR rate, excessive wakeups, and more.
- Firebase Crashlytics: Get detailed custom crash reporting data about crashes in your app. Crashes are grouped into clusters with similar stack traces and triaged by the severity of impact on your users. In addition to receiving automatic reports, you can log custom events to help capture the steps leading up to a crash
Check out the following table for more details on the similarities and differences between these two crash reporting tools.
| Product Features | Android vitals | Firebase Crashlytics |
| Crash rates | ✓ | ✓ |
| Crash insights | ✓ | |
| Provides Application Not Responding (ANR) data | ✓ | |
| No SDK or app changes required | ✓ | |
| Logs and keys to customize crash data | ✓ | |
| Detailed crash traces on NDK | ✓ | ✓ |
| Export crash data to BigQuery | ✓ | |
| Captures predefined Google Analytics events (breadcrumbs) | ✓ | |
| Cross-platform | ✓ | |
| Integration with external tools (for example, Jira, Slack, PagerDuty) | ✓ | |
| Anomaly alerts | ✓ | |
| Crash status tracking and regression alerts | ✓ | |
| Log non-fatal issues (for example, logs events that might disrupt the normal flow of a program, such as caught exceptions) | ✓ |
Best practices
- Check your app’s performance on the Android vitals dashboard, including crash rate, ANR rate, excessive wakeups, and stuck partial wake locks. Sign up for “Android vitals alerts” in your notification preferences to receive an email when we find a significant core vital regression.
- Get custom crash reporting data with custom logs and keys. Log additional crash data using custom logs and keys, which provides you with a snapshot of information at one point in time and records the events taken by a user leading up to the crash.
- Integrate your app with Google Analytics to capture predefined events. Automatically capture predefined Google Analytics events using breadcrumbs. Just like custom logs and keys, breadcrumbs can further enhance your crash reporting by showing the actions a user has taken prior to a crash, as well as the parameters within the event.
- Take more control over your crash data. Export your crash data from Firebase Crashlytics to BigQuery to do custom analysis of your crash data.