Android Application Error Reports

[This post, a initial in a series about brand new features in Android 2.2 ("Froyo"), is by Jacek Surazski, a Googler from our Krakow office.Tim Bray]

The upcoming release of Android will include a brand new bug reporting underline for Market apps. Developers will embrace crash as good as solidify reports from their users. The reports will be accessible when they log into their Android Market publishing house account. No more blind debugging!

When an app freezes or stops responding, a user can send a bug inform to a developer with a click of a button, right from their phone. The brand new button appears in a application error dialog; if a user chooses to click it, a Google Feedback customer running upon a device will analyze a offending app as good as compose a inform with report indispensable to diagnose it. The complement is set up with user privacy in mindthe app developer will not embrace report which could brand a user in any way. The user can additionally preview all report which will be sent.

If users select to do so, they might additionally send additional complement report similar to device logs. Because there is a possibility these might contain private information, they will not be passed upon to a developer; they will be used by Google to lane down bugs in a Android complement itself.

On a reception end, developers will get collection to diagnose, triage as good as repair bugs in their apps. A renouned app can beget hundreds of thousands of reports. Google Feedback aggregates them into "bugs" - individual programming errors. Bugs have been displayed to developers sorted by severity, measured as a rate at which reports for a bug have been issuing in.

Clicking upon a bug will display report such as smoke-stack traces, statistics about which sort of hardware a bug occurred upon as good as what versions of a app a user was running. In case of freezes, smoke-stack traces for all threads in a app will be displayed. This data should give developers a good idea how good their apps have been faring in a wild.

Google is constantly operative upon mending as good as fluctuating a feedback underline to provide developers with collection to urge a quality of their apps. The benefits should be felt by both developers as good as their users.

[I suggest examination a video of this feature's proclamation in Vic Gundotra's Google I/O keynote upon May 20th, often for a audience reaction. we listen to which a tall suit of developers have been making make use of of a Market's brand new "Bugs" tab. Tim Bray]

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