ACRA - Application Crash Report for Android

The worst part in having FC-s in your application, is the user response, which is 1 star reviews and disappointed user's comments in the android market.
For example: "crash on start" or "bad..uninstall", 1*. These are quite common on the android market, and are not very helpful, for developers. You don't see users mailing in crash reports, very often, because it's hard for the avarage user, to get the data, the devs need.
A few days ago in Jozsi’s article Useful Java APIs for Android applications, a commenter named Kevin Gaudin (thanks Kevin!) recommended ACRA - Application Crash Report for Android. He is also the developer of the project.

ACRA works like this:
"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."

ACRA on google code
So the FC dialog will be replaced by a method of the developers choice(silent data sending, toast, notification bar).
Check the wiki for instructions, it's very easy to deploy it, to any project.
One great feature for us is, that it can send crash reports from any device. We always had issues connecting our T-mobile Pulse to the sdk, we never managed to read a single line of log from it. It also helps if there are several developers working together, and want to send automated crash reports to each other.

Privacy is a very important topic, ACRA has several ways of notifying the user. We liked the status bar notification the best.
During a developments testing phase, it's best to set it to automatic sending, with just a toast as notification.

One thing that you have to be careful at, is if you use a private google (docs) account, ACRA won't be able to write into the spreadsheet it needs. Check your privacy settings, if you don't see the crash reports arriving!

Now that android 2.2 is out, and it has "Android Application Error Reports" integrated, it seems that ACRA came a little too late. Sadly, a lot of devices will never see official 2.2 updates, so if you want to support more devices, ACRA is the way to go.
Android Platform Versions

Comments

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Having read all the post from the top to the bottom, I have a nice idea of creating a blog of my own and to express my thoughts freely

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Friends are those who are supposed to help whe it is difficult. Hope you have got the same ones

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Hmm strange this post is totaly irrelevant to the search query I entered in google but it was listed on the first page.

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I think your blog need a new wordpress template.

You really make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and very broad for me.
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I like the fact they drop the reports right into Google docs. :) Nothing like Google keeping everything Google-centric!
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I feel like this is still very much in the development stage, android is doing good and I'm sure they'll fix any bugs that they are encountering along the way.

Thank you

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Google needs to fix many probs in Andriod may be it will do it anyway thanks.
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