Crashcan: Building a Better Mobile Crash Analytics Platform
Article Summary
Etsy built Crashcan, their own mobile crash analytics layer on top of a third-party provider. Why not just use the vendor's dashboard?
Mobile crashes are fundamentally different from web errors: they arrive delayed, affect multiple app versions simultaneously, and lose user state. Etsy's team needed custom analysis that their external crash provider couldn't deliver, so they built a PHP-based wrapper to augment the data.
Key Takeaways
- Mobile crashes can take days or weeks to report, unlike instant web errors
- Built custom deduplication to group crashes across app versions and OS updates
- Linked crash data to internal user accounts and tooling for faster debugging
- Used MySQL, Doctrine ORM, and queue-based workers to process crash ingestion
- Monitoring gaps caused weeks-long outages before StatsD and Nagios integration
Critical Insight
Crashcan gave Etsy the customization they needed (version range filtering, user linking, better grouping) without maintaining full crash infrastructure.
