Investigating Crashes with Aardvark
Article Summary
Cash App open sourced a tool that solves one of iOS debugging's most frustrating problems: crashes that you can't reproduce locally.
Nick Entin from Cash App explains how crash reports often lack the context needed to debug issues, especially for background thread crashes. The team built AardvarkCrashReport to bridge the gap between crash data and bug reports.
Key Takeaways
- Crash reports with stack traces often lack context to reproduce issues
- Manually matching crash reports to bug reports wastes significant developer time
- AardvarkCrashReport automatically embeds crash data into Aardvark bug reports
- Framework detects crashes on launch and prompts users to file reports
- Also supports attaching live reports for debugging performance issues
AardvarkCrashReport eliminates manual cross-referencing by automatically bundling crash data with bug reports, giving developers full application state context.
About This Article
When background threads crash, developers don't get enough context to reproduce the issue locally. Stack traces and exception information help, but they're often not enough to understand how the app reached that broken state.
Nick Entin and his team at Cash App built AardvarkCrashReport to attach crash data directly to Aardvark bug reports. This removes the tedious work of manually matching crash reports across different systems.
Developers get the full application state alongside crash data in one place. They spend less time hunting through multiple records to find the right crash report.