My Hoptoad (Airbreak) Problems

So iPhone users have this knack for never syncing their phones to iTunes and as a result lots of crash reports never get sent to iTunes Connect for developers.

To work around this problem I started using Hoptoad (Now being renamed Airbreak) which is a neat little tool that will capture the crash as it’s happening and interrogate the runtime to create a symbolized crash log. On app relaunch it will ask the user if they’d like to submit the log to the developer (through the Hoptoad web service). Overall, a pretty cool idea.

I used it in Dex and things went great. I ended up with a nice collection of stacked and collated crashes and used them to fix a bunch of bugs. As I was working on TwizShow I installed Hoptoad and had my first problem.

  1. TwizShow is a universal app and during development I had a tendency to use my iPhone 4 but I when I went to give demos I used the iPad, version 1 at the time, (so more people could see the game in action). The iPad version crashed a lot and even worse did so in a manner that didn’t cause a Hoptoad log or any other logs to be generated. In time I’ve come to believe was because of excessive memory use due to the iPad’s limited RAM (256 MB) and the fact I was using lots of high res art) but have not much to back this up with.

  2. Now in deployment TwizShow is generating some crash logs but they are no longer symbolized. I don’t know why.

  3. Dex, which was once working great, is no longer getting crash logs. The last one was June 3rd. The last update to Dex was April 19th so I assume the change and cause of the bug is on their end.

  4. All the old crash logs of Dex are gone. This is part of a new Hoptoad policy where they remove old crash logs to save space. They say:

In order to reduce space consumed by old or redundant data Hoptoad may remove backtraces and extra request information from individual error occurances. If data is removed, the Rails environment name, error class, error message, file, controller, action, and date are preserved.

We’ll that nice and dandy for the Rails apps, but for iOS crashes this is all that is left after they removed the backtraces for my crash:

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Not bloody useful. Why they need to save storage space which is crazy cheap and they are a pay for service (I pay $15 a month) I’ll never know. If they are insistant at least leave 10 or so backtraces per crash so I can have some idea what’s going on.

All in all I think I’m on my way to drop Hoptoad and move on to another service, maybe HockeyApp. If you have any feedback or advice based on your own apps, I’d love to hear it.

Posted on: July 21, 2011 – 2:58 PM

One Comment

  1. Patrick Burleson wrote:

    I’m currently using HockeyApp’s hosted service and it’s rocking. I’m able to do both my apps, plus client apps as they add me as a developer. Very well done.

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