Crash reporter

A crash reporter is a software application whose function is to identify report crash details and to alert when there are crashes, on production or on development / testing environments. Crash reports often include data such as stack traces, type of crash, trends and version of software. These reports helps software developers- Web, SAAS, mobile apps and more, to diagnose and fix the underlying problem causing the crashes.

Implementing crash reporting tools as part of the development cycle has become a standard, and crash reporting tools have become a commodity, many of them are offered for free, like Crashlytics.

Many giant industry players, that are part of the software development eco-system have entered the game. Companies such as Twitter, Google and others are putting a lot of efforts on encouraging software developers to use their APIs, knowing this will increase their revenues down the road (through advertisements and other mechanisms). As they realize that they must offer elegant solutions for as many as possible development issues, otherwise their competitors will take actions, they keep adding advanced features. Crash reporting tools make an important development functionality that giant companies include in their portfolio of solutions.

Many tools are specialized in mobile app crash reporting. Many of them are SDKs.

In Mac OS X there is a standard crash reporter in /System/Library/CoreServices/Crash Reporter.app. Crash Reporter.app sends the Unix crash logs to Apple for their engineers to look at. The top text field of the window has the crash log, while the bottom field is for user comments. Users may also copy and paste the log in their email client to send to the application vendor for them to use. Crash Reporter.app has 3 main modes: display nothing on crash, display "Application has crashed" dialog box or display Crash Report window.

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