Announcing free CrashBuddy advanced diagnostics

Drew CrawfordNews

As a leading developer of iPhone and iPad Touch applications, our clients have come to trust us to deliver the best iOS experience possible.

But unlike other developers who focus only on contract development services, we also write and support our own applications in-house. We understand customer and support pain points like no other for-hire software developer. In addition to being “just” a great iOS developer, we draw on our experience building and designing our own applications to make our clients’ lives easier.

Crashes tend to make customers angryOne of the biggest problems in customer support is diagnosing application crashes. Customers can report crashes that are difficult to reproduce in-house or that seem to be unexplainable. To further complicate matters, Apple’s crash reporter is unreliable and does not always deliver the information necessary for developers to identify and fix these crashes. In addition, upwards of 75% of iOS users have disabled crash reporting, so you may never even find out that your users are experiencing a crash. Even if Apple’s crash reporter happens to work and if the customer has enabled crash reporting, many app developers forget to check their iTunes accounts for crash reports or do so only sporadically. In practice, we suspect over 98% of crashes go completely unreported.

Today we’re announcing CrashBuddy, our new, proprietary, iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad crash reporting technology. CrashBuddy ensures that crash reports are instantly sent to us, every time. It works independently of Apple’s crash reporter and whether or not users have crash reporting enabled to ensure that every crash, anywhere in the world, is always reported along with complete diagnostic information so the crash can be reproduced and fixed. We drew heavily on our depth of experience remotely diagnosing and fixing crashes to engineer a solution that is the best in class in crash reporting and diagnostics.

Advanced analytics and reportingBut CrashBuddy does more than just send error reports. Every crash is automatically categorized and root-caused by a proprietary algorithm so we know exactly how many customers are affected by the crash, exactly what part of the application is causing the crash, and how often an individual customer is affected, everywhere in the world. We also strip all private information from crash reports as part of our commitment to users’ privacy.

We’ve been rolling out CrashBuddy to some of our applications as a test over the last month, and the results have been wildly successful. We’ve been able to fix rare and odd crashes that were previously undiagnosable and unreproducible, and we now have the confidence of exact figures and statistics to guide our updates and bug fixes going forward. But instead of keeping this technology to ourselves, we want our clients to benefit from our hard work solving this difficult problem.

Today we’re announcing that every app we build for our clients going forward will have CrashBuddy advanced crash reporting and diagnostics “baked in” at no charge. We want every client to benefit from our advanced reporting so that we have the best possible information to diagnose and understand the impact of application crashes. This breakthrough technology is not available from any other vendor and is just one more way that we stand head and shoulders above the competition. We’re much more than just another developer–we’re your partner in delivering an awesome experience for your customers. Contact us today to find out about developing your app with this advanced diagnostic capability.