How do I obtain crash-data from my Android application?

Question

How can I get crash data (stack traces at least) from my Android application? At least when working on my own device being retrieved by cable, but ideally from any instance

Answer 1

If you want answers immediately you can use logcat

$adb shell logcat -f /sdcard/logoutput.txt *:E

If there's too much junk in your log right now, try clearing it first.

$adb shell logcat -c

Then try running your app then logcat again.

Answer 2

You might try the ACRA (Application Crash Report for Android) library:

ACRA is a library enabling Android Application to automatically post their crash reports to a GoogleDoc form. It is targetted to android applications developers to help them get data from their applications when they crash or behave erroneously.

It's easy to install in your app, highly configurable and don't require you to host a server script anywhere... reports are sent to a Google Doc spreadsheet !

Answer 3

For sample applications and debugging purposes, I use a simple solution that allows me to write the stacktrace to the sd card of the device and/or upload it to a server. This solution has been inspired by Project android-remote-stacktrace (specifically, the save-to-device and upload-to-server parts) and I think it solves the problem mentioned by Soonil. It's not optimal, but it works and you can improve it if you want to use it in a production application. If you decide to upload the stacktraces to the server, you can use a php script (index.php) to view them. If you're interested, you can find all the sources below - one java class for your application and two optional php scrips for the server hosting the uploaded stacktraces.

In a Context (e.g. the main Activity), call

if(!(Thread.getDefaultUncaughtExceptionHandler() instanceof CustomExceptionHandler)) {
    Thread.setDefaultUncaughtExceptionHandler(new CustomExceptionHandler(
            "/sdcard/<desired_local_path>", "http://<desired_url>/upload.php"));
}

CustomExceptionHandler

public class CustomExceptionHandler implements UncaughtExceptionHandler {

    private UncaughtExceptionHandler defaultUEH;

    private String localPath;

    private String url;

    /* 
     * if any of the parameters is null, the respective functionality 
     * will not be used 
     */
    public CustomExceptionHandler(String localPath, String url) {
        this.localPath = localPath;
        this.url = url;
        this.defaultUEH = Thread.getDefaultUncaughtExceptionHandler();
    }

    public void uncaughtException(Thread t, Throwable e) {
        String timestamp = TimestampFormatter.getInstance().getTimestamp();
        final Writer result = new StringWriter();
        final PrintWriter printWriter = new PrintWriter(result);
        e.printStackTrace(printWriter);
        String stacktrace = result.toString();
        printWriter.close();
        String filename = timestamp + ".stacktrace";

        if (localPath != null) {
            writeToFile(stacktrace, filename);
        }
        if (url != null) {
            sendToServer(stacktrace, filename);
        }

        defaultUEH.uncaughtException(t, e);
    }

    private void writeToFile(String stacktrace, String filename) {
        try {
            BufferedWriter bos = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(
                    localPath + "/" + filename));
            bos.write(stacktrace);
            bos.flush();
            bos.close();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    private void sendToServer(String stacktrace, String filename) {
        DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url);
        List<NameValuePair> nvps = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
        nvps.add(new BasicNameValuePair("filename", filename));
        nvps.add(new BasicNameValuePair("stacktrace", stacktrace));
        try {
            httpPost.setEntity(
                    new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nvps, HTTP.UTF_8));
            httpClient.execute(httpPost);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

upload.php

<?php
    $filename = isset($_POST['filename']) ? $_POST['filename'] : "";
    $message = isset($_POST['stacktrace']) ? $_POST['stacktrace'] : "";
    if (!ereg('^[-a-zA-Z0-9_. ]+$', $filename) || $message == ""){
        die("This script is used to log debug data. Please send the "
                . "logging message and a filename as POST variables.");
    }
    file_put_contents($filename, $message . "\n", FILE_APPEND);
?>

index.php

<?php
    $myDirectory = opendir(".");
    while($entryName = readdir($myDirectory)) {
        $dirArray[] = $entryName;
    }
    closedir($myDirectory);
    $indexCount = count($dirArray);
    sort($dirArray);
    print("<TABLE border=1 cellpadding=5 cellspacing=0 \n");
    print("<TR><TH>Filename</TH><TH>Filetype</th><th>Filesize</TH></TR>\n");
    for($index=0; $index < $indexCount; $index++) {
        if ((substr("$dirArray[$index]", 0, 1) != ".") 
                && (strrpos("$dirArray[$index]", ".stacktrace") != false)){ 
            print("<TR><TD>");
            print("<a href=\"$dirArray[$index]\">$dirArray[$index]</a>");
            print("</TD><TD>");
            print(filetype($dirArray[$index]));
            print("</TD><TD>");
            print(filesize($dirArray[$index]));
            print("</TD></TR>\n");
        }
    }
    print("</TABLE>\n");
?>

Answer 4

In Android 2.2 it's now possible to automatically get Crash Reports from Android Market Applications:

New bug reporting feature for Android Market apps enables developers to receive crash and freeze reports from their users. The reports will be available when they log into their publisher account.

http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.2-highlights.html

Answer 5

I've been using Crittercism for my Android and iOS apps -- heard about them on techcrunch. Pretty happy with them so far!

Answer 6

We use our home-grown system inside the company and it serves us very well. It's an android library that send crash reports to server and server that receives reports and makes some analytics. Server groups exceptions by exception name, stacktrace, message. It helps to identify most critical issues that need to be fixed. Our service is in public beta now so everyone can try it. You can create account at http://watchcat.co or you can just take a look how it works using demo access http://watchcat.co/reports/index.php?demo.