Investigating Crashes with Aardvark

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

The article walks through the specific integration steps and explains how the framework handles crash detection timing.