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.
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.
For full disclosure, I work at Instabug. Let me know if I can help.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Related
I built this app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FindNewMusic_Vakil
But ios keeps rejecting me for following reason:
Guideline 4.2.3 - Design - Minimum Functionality
We were required to install Spotify before we could use your app. Apps should be able to run on launch, without requiring additional apps to be installed.
Next Steps
To resolve this issue, please revise your app to ensure that users can use it upon launch. If your app requires authentication before use, please use methods that can authenticate users from within your app.
Even though I added another functionality which enables you to view artist in app (following pics).
Any ideas of what I should do to get app to be approved because I am lost at this point
The guideline clearly states that your app depends on other application for serving its purpose. What you're trying to do is novel but simply recommending won't suffice in my opinion. You could try providing a sample of the music and then if the user likes it, you could provide him/her with the option of redirecting to spotify. Your app should serve some purpose on its own. That's just my opinion however.
I want to add a Bug Report/Report Problem option to my app, which sends device and app info and a user's comment to the developer. I was wondering if there are any "standard" things to report? I am reporting OS Version, Device Name and App Version. Is there anything important I'm missing out and should include? What are you guys normally including ?
You could avoid sending out this data manually by integrating with a service like Instabug
which allows the user to report bugs through your preferred method, but mainly through shaking the device.
It will display a screenshot of the current view that the user can draw on for visual bug identification. What gets reported along is (but not only) the following:
App version
Device type
OS version
Location
CPU load
Memory usage
Storage
Connectivity
Battery
Orientation
Network and console logs
Visual reproduction steps
UI view hierarchy inspection
users can further describe the bug using text, extra screenshots, voice notes, or screen recordings.
All reports arrive in your Instabug dashboard containing various details such as:
Network and console logs
Complete Device details
Reproduction steps
Crash stack trace (In case of a crash report)
It only takes a line of code to integrate.
For full disclosure, I work at Instabug. Let me know if I can help.
Check out the free service
http://www.crashlytics.com/
you can get the features what is mentioned above.
Is there any service that can be used to monitor how a beta-user engages in an android application I made?
I've looked into different analytic solutions, but they all come with the disclaimer that I should not send "unique identification information about the users" - fair enough, and I can appreciate the privacy concerns. But I need to dig that information during my beta testing.
Currently, I'm emailing the apk files to a few people to install the app and test on their phones. They give me feedback, but not all of them are good at describing exactly what they are doing. I need more detailed information - like how they opened the app (was it a fresh open, or did they relaunch it from the running app list?), what exactly they did in the app and if possible, to get some debugging information too, since some issues are unique to the specific model of phone they use.
In a nutshell, it means that I need to dig into my beta-testers devices - and they all agree to it too, so its not like I'm spying on them or some such. (At the very least, I want to record their behavior in my app with permission)
Is anything like this available? If not, are there any other approaches I can use to solve/debug issues that generate from end-user behavior? (NOTE: I'm not talking about app crashing/hanging. The app is stable - its just not working correctly)
Stuff that doesn't seem to work:
http://acra.ch/
This looks more like a crash reporting tool than a usage/monitoring tool. :(
http://try.crashlytics.com/
Similar issues to above
Paid levels of BugSense come with a feature called Bread Crumbs, which I've never used but which sound like what you need.
I have been working on an android project and published it to the market. I then installed the app on my device via the play store and upon doing something I found a possible way to crash the app.
When the app force closed it asked me if I wanted to send a report which I did so I could see what it looks like in the developer console.
I added some text about what I did to cause the app to force close and could then view what the crash report looked like and it conained various information like device make and model etc. I submitted and I logged in to my developer account but could not see any of the information within the crash report other than the message I put inside explaining what I did.
Where does the rest of the information go as unless someone actually says what phone or android version they are running in the message I don't what I need to replicate the issue.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
AFAIK, you cannot view the device etc. in the developer console. You can only view the user message (if provided) or the stack trace. Beyond that there is no more information as far as I know.
However, you can get much more information by integrating ACRA into your application. This will give you a huge amount of information about the crash, including memory statistics, the device, the android version it is running etc.
EDIT
It would seem that the device at least is displayed in the new Developer Console, but the information still isn't even close to what ACRA provides.
With the standard report included it depends a bit on android(?) or play store app version what details you get in your reports it seems. In the publisher/developer console (example from the new developer console version):
How can I accept feedback like bug reports, suggestions, and comments from my users in-app?
From what I can tell, the Android platform and Play offer no solutions for issue tracking or forums.
To clarify, I'm not looking for a way to submit crash reports exclusively, and I'm not looking to track user behavior. I'm looking for a way for users to report unexpected behavior, ideas for enhancements, etc.
You could make use of Instabug’s SDK. It includes several features which are
all relevant to your concerns:
Bug reporting - allows users to report bugs through a shake gesture.
Crash Reporting - automatically gets sent whenever one occurs.
In-app Chat - have a live conversation with your users in-app to get
more feedback.
Feature Requests - allow users to suggest new features and upvote existing ideas.
In-App Surveys - Survey your users right inside your app with text multiple choice, or star rating questions.
For full disclosure, I work at Instabug. Let me know if I can help.
For bug reports you can use Airbrake. The good thing about this one is that you can add custom information. Moreover you can send a report at any time in your app (say you found a weird situation that you need to notify about).
For analytics, Flurry worked well for me. It's simple but to the point.
Ultimately, you can use both for the major platforms so that you have everything in one place.
I'm going to try out UserVoice with their REST API.