dale lane

A month ago, I submitted an app to the Android Market app store for the first time, and shared the experience – from compiling the app to it being live in the Market on people’s phones.

I thought I’d follow this up with a quick post on what happens after your app goes live in the Market.

Again, as before, this is aimed at the idle curiosity of people who use mobile app stores, rather than trying to replace the detailed documentation provided for mobile developers.

Crash reports

My favourite part are the Error Reports. As a developer, you can see when your app crashes on people’s phones. You can see how often it happens, how many people it has affected, and how many times it has happened.

I’ve not had any errors (I’m almost disappointed! 😉 ) so the screenshots on the Android developer’s blog are perhaps a better example. You can see that not only do you get told that an error has happened, but (as these are Java apps) you get the stack trace at the point of the error, telling you exactly where the app crashed.

This should make it a million times easier to debug buggy apps – it’s the sort of functionality that I’ve tried to manually build into apps before, but with Android you get it out-of-the-box. This is awesome.

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