Conquering Our Android Crash Count
Article Summary
Strava thought they had a few hundred crashes per day. Crashlytics revealed they were missing 42,000 crashes per week.
The Strava Android team integrated Crashlytics crash reporting and discovered their app stability was far worse than Google Play Store metrics suggested. This is their journey from 5% of users experiencing daily crashes down to less than 1%.
Key Takeaways
- Crashlytics revealed 7,000+ daily crashes that Google Play never reported
- Single IllegalStateException in Android TTS caused 50% of all crashes
- Setting largeHeap=true reduced crashes 71% by addressing Google Maps OOMs
- Three releases over 10 weeks brought crash rate from 5% to under 1%
- Most remaining crashes now occur on legacy devices without largeHeap support
By implementing proper crash reporting and systematically fixing the top offenders, Strava reduced their Android crash rate from 5% to under 1% of daily users in just 10 weeks.
About This Article
Strava's Android app kept crashing with IllegalStateException errors from the Text-to-Speech system. In the first week of version 4.1.6, there were 20,000 of these crashes. The team also found fragment state loss and asynchronous receiver issues, but Google Play Store metrics weren't picking them up.
The team logged the TTS exception and fixed the underlying problems in version 4.1.7. They added fragment attachment checks before calling Fragment#getActivity() and patched fragment state loss bugs in the most-used Activities.
Version 4.1.7 cut crashes by 55% in the first three days. Daily weekday crashes dropped from 7,000 to 3,000. This meant 6,000 to 8,000 more daily user sessions that didn't end in a crash.