Crittercism - Is integration with android really that easy?

Question

This is the first time I am integrating a crash reporting service to my application. So, please bear with me if this is a dumb question...

I have followed the instructions given here and (i hopefully)integrated Crittercism to one of my projects. My application is still under development, so I can't see the reports to myself and say that I got it to work.

Can someone let me know, Apart from doing the steps given in the above link, do I have to do anything else, to get it work on my application?

If I am done with integrating, will I get crash reports for all activities in my app? because, I see a lot of questions on Crittercism at SO, which I don't understand yet.

Answer 1

I'm Rob, one of the co-founders of Crittercism. Yes, it really is that straightfoward as adding the jar and initializing the SDK with:

Crittercism.init(getApplicationContext(), "CRITTERCISM_APP_ID");

An easy way to check that you've integrated correctly is by loading the live stats page in your app (there should be a tab on the left hand side of the page labelled "Live Stats"). On that page, you can see a live view of the app sessions, crashes, and handled exceptions in real time. You can load your app in a simulator or on an Android device and watch the app loads graph go up and if does, then you should be good to go.

Also, as @EddieFreeman mentioned above, you can intentionally throw an exception somewhere in your app (most developers tie this to a button click) to simulate a crash. Just make sure you take it out of your app before submitting to the app store :)

Answer 2

One caveat with integration for Android is when dealing with Native crashes. When you test your integration the best way is to throw an exception such as below:

throw new IllegalArgumentException();

This ensures that you're testing the types of exceptions that the regular Android SDK handles.

If you'd like to extend coverage to Dalvik and other native crashes, not just from native code in your app, but also for any occurrence then check out the NDK solution as this will give you more complete visibility.