#crittercism

Crittercism provides a real-time global view of app diagnostics and crashes across iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Hybrid and HTML5 apps. It offers some easy-to-understand statistics about crashes in specific versions of the app, how often they occurred and how many users have been affected by it. So for instance when your app crashes in Taiwain, you will get a notification about that with the stacktrace of the crash and additional hardware information.

There is actually much more information and features Crittercism offers, but in this post I will mainly focus on the crash-handling features and how you can integrate Crittercism in your Android App.

    Integrating Crittercism in your Android App

First of all, you need to download the Crittercism jar-file, which you can find here:

http://docs.crittercism.com/downloads/downloads.html

Put the jar-file into your App's libs folder

The next step is to give Crittercism the following permissions, which you must add to the AndroidManifest.xml, if they are not already included:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_LOGS"/> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE"/> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.GET_TASKS"/>

Now you only need to initialize Crittercism in your App, which should be done in your main Activity class. For instance in our App "Picment" that is done in StartActivity in the onCreate method

import com.crittercism.app.Crittercism; public class StartActivity extends Activity { public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); Crittercism.initialize(getApplicationContext(), "YourCrittercismAppID"); . . . } }

Your “Crittercism App ID” is given to you, after you have registered your app on Crittercism. Check out this website, in case you don’t know how to do that. If you have already registered your app, you need to go to “Setting > App Settings”. There you will find your App ID under “Application Information”

Congratulations! Everything is set up and you are ready to use Crittercism. Now if your app crashes, you will be notified with an email about it. As I mentioned at the beginning, Crittercism offers alot of information and tons of analytics, but personally I mostly take a look at the overview of the crashes and each of the stacktraces thrown by the app.

  Here is an overview of the crashes for a specific version of the app:

And here you see a stacktrace a device has thrown: