iOS: How should I read this crash report that says my app was killed via pthread_kill and SIGABRT?

Question

I am wondering if there is anything in the following stack trace that I received from Crashlytics that I should be concerned about:

EXC_BAD_ACCESS KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x000000007becbeb8 

Thread : Crashed: com.apple.main-thread
0  libsystem_kernel.dylib         0x3a3c61fc __pthread_kill + 8
1  libsystem_pthread.dylib        0x3a42fa33 pthread_kill + 58
2  libsystem_c.dylib              0x3a376ffd abort + 76
3  libc++abi.dylib                0x396a5cd7 abort_message + 74
4  libc++abi.dylib                0x396be6e5 default_terminate_handler() + 252
5  libobjc.A.dylib                0x39e07921 _objc_terminate() + 192
6  libc++abi.dylib                0x396bc1c7 std::__terminate(void (*)()) + 78
7  libc++abi.dylib                0x396bbd2d __cxa_increment_exception_refcount
8  libobjc.A.dylib                0x39e077f7 objc_exception_rethrow + 42
9  CoreFoundation                 0x2f499c9d CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 640
10 CoreFoundation                 0x2f499a0b CFRunLoopRunInMode + 106
11 GraphicsServices               0x3419a283 GSEventRunModal + 138
12 UIKit                          0x31d3d049 UIApplicationMain + 1136
13 Pocket Linesman                0x0005aa8b main + 17 (main.m:17)

From my searching around the internet, I am unable to find an example of where this type of crash has an actionable fix for it. Also, I am completely unable to reproduce a crash like this through a normal interaction in my app.

Does this stack trace indicate a normal crash due to low memory issues on the user's iOS device, or something more?

This is my first app using Crashlytics, so i am still learning how to read the reports it sends me.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The original source of the crash is an uncaught exception. The original exception was caught and rethrown from CFRunLoopRunSpecific(). That has obscured the original source of the exception in the backtrace. Sometimes, the exception details are logged and they might indicate the original backtrace. Do you have any log messages that may have been written at the same time?

Answer 2

I was running into the same issue whenever the crash was caused by UI code.

Have you set NSSetUncaughtExceptionHandler in your app delegate by any chance? Setting mine caused me to get the useless pthread_kill message.

Unsetting mine in distributed builds allowed me to get more useful crash reporting from the same error.

Hope this helps :)