What is the purpose of crittercism's NotificationActivity in Android

Question

I am working on some legacy code that includes the following line in the AndroidManifest.xml file:

        <activity android:name="com.crittercism.NotificationActivity"/>

Since I can't find any mention of this in the Crittercism docs, I wonder what its purpose is and if it might be obsolete now. Since my company is using Crittercism for bug reporting, I can't just remove all references to Crittercism without thinking.

So I'm trying to figure out the purpose of this Activity. When I start it from the command line, I get a blank screen, but if I launch it with the string extra "-e com.crittercism.notification XXX", then the Activity will show the message "Developer: XXX". (I figured this out by decompiling the crittercism.jar file.) Removing the Activity from the AM.xml file does not seem to break anything but I'm not sure - perhaps it gets used later somehow.

Answer 1

First off, removing this activity is safe to do, especially in the latest version of the Crittercism SDK.

Within the context of Crittercism, the Notification activity provided the agent the ability to pop up a message to the user within the app. To go a bit deeper, whenever your application crashes Crittercism provides a list of users affected by that crash within the crash report. Via an interface on the Crittercism portal, you were able to send a notification to the users affected with a message such as "Hey sorry about the trouble, we're working on this now and will let you know when the bug has been fixed" or something along those lines. This message would pop up on next app load.

This feature was deprecated last year in lieu of customer communication via partnerships with companies like UserVoice, Helpshift, etc and I'm sure there will be others.

You can update to the latest Library (found here : Crittercism Android Downloads) and see the changes Crittercism has made for yourself.

Answer 2

The role of Notification activity is whenever you get application crash, Crittercism will notify you at your email id that a crash has occured at particular file. If you remove this line,you will not be notified.

However,it seems that in latest sdk you do not have to add this line.

Check this : Crittercism Android Docs

Hope this answers your question.