How to instruct users to report a bug in Android

Question

How do you instruct users to report a bug in Android? Any advice or tips?

I'd like to get send detailed instructions to my users to get the most of their bug report. I know there are various apps that send bug reports from the device and I was wondering how other Android developers deal with this.

Answer 1

Taking Gilbert's advice into account, I decided to create my own app. I hereby present you: Bug Reporter.

It allows users to send you a report with device information and optional logcat. It also supports intent extras to customize its behavior if case you want to launch it from your app.

Answer 2

A bug reporting SDK such as Instabug can let you achieve that.

As you can see, it displays, by default, a welcome message to your users 10 seconds after opening the app. It displays instructions on how to invoke Instabug depending on the invocation method you're using (A button or a shake gesture).

After signing up and including the library in your code, you can switch between different display messages. Use either of the following lines depending on whether you're in beta or production.

Instabug.setWelcomeMessageState(WelcomeMessage.State.BETA);
Instabug.setWelcomeMessageState(WelcomeMessage.State.LIVE);

Each bug report contains various information about device details, network logs, console logs, view hierarchy inspection, and visual reproduction steps.

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For full disclosure, I work at Instabug. Let me know if I can help.

Answer 3

There are solutions for instrumenting the application in a way that will collect contextual information and allow the user to provide in-app feedback. Either by shaking the phone or some other trigger like a menu option.

Here is a "currently free" offering from IBM called Mobile Quality Assurance, that will instrument the application so that as a user uses the application contextual information is collected as they use the app. When they want to provide feedback or submit a bug, they can shake the phone and it will capture the screen at the time, give them a form to enter additional information and then submit the screenshot, contextual information and comments to the testing portal.

Here's a link for more info on MQA

Answer 4

You can do what google does with their new maps application on iPhone. When you're using the app and shake the phone (which users do when they're frustrated or something isn't working) you can pop up a screen that asks if something is wrong and is a form for bug submission that they can choose to fill out.

Answer 5

This isn't Android specific, but you could have a bug reporting screen in your application that sends the information your customers type, along with any system information you wish to capture, to your web server. Alternatively, the application could email you with the information.

Answer 6

There are some libraries you can integrate to do this job, you don't need to develop a solution yourself. For example, I'm using blit feedback. With this library you can take snapshots, draw on them and add some comments. I've configured it to send reports by email, but if you have an issue tracker you can connect it too.

Answer 7

Discovered this question a lot late. There are answers given but the products mentioned or the techniques are quite old now. Adding the tool that we have been working on - Bugclipper

This tool let's your users report issues from with-in the app Android or iOS and you can add/annotate screenshots, create screen recordings with voice and also get the crash logs.

p.s. - I am one of the co-founders.