Crashlytics now serves over 1M apps | Hacker News Reader

Crashlytics now serves over 1M apps

crashlytics.com

51 pointsgrowthhack29 comments

The problem with Crashlytics is that you can't get your data out besides through their pretty website. Their search is limited and there's no adhoc querying. There's no API so you can't integrate with any of your other tools. Also, you have to trust Twitter with your app's data.

Have you guys tried out Crittercism? (Full disclosure - I'm Rob, one of the founders and CTO) - We have an API (http://docs.crittercism.com/api/api.html), alerting, PagerDuty integration, automatic tracking of events like loss of internet connectivity, app background/foreground, etc.

They also need to add proper alerting. Telling me that my app with 1m users has reached "Impact Level 2" for a particular bug because it's affected 50 people is basically useless.

If they had a proper querying API you could build your own alerting and integrate it with PagerDuty or whatever system you might use.

We actually integrate with PagerDuty and a bunch of other services already (users can submit integrations too) :-)

Existing integrations: http://try.crashlytics.com/integrations/

Submit integrations using: https://github.com/crashlytics/crashlytics-services

The only thing those integrations do is handle the existing Crashlytics-defined alerts. I'm not allowed to define my own alerts.

Agree. That's an area I personally want to address and am addressing. Oh the stories I have around that!

Wayne here. I hear your loud and clear. Working on it.. :-)

This may not be relevant anymore, but last year I made a simple tool to get stats out: https://github.com/MattNewberry/crashstats

>> "There's no API so you can't integrate with any of your other tools."

There's no API but they do offer some integrations with things like Asana, BitBucket, Slack etc. through the settings page.

There is no way this is calculated on a 'fair' basis. There are around 3 million apps total between different platforms for mobile. This 1M number must be calculated counting versions of apps as new apps.

Many apps have come and gone as well. I know my enterprise app from 2011 is no longer in the app store after they failed to maintain it, but is likely still active in Crashlytics.

Excellent product by the way. Very polished even from early beta.

There are probably many unpublished (prototype, development version) apps.

Yeah, 1M sounds super fishy. Is this like when websites publishes total number of accounts, but not DAU?

> our systems have now seen more than 1 million apps integrated with Crashlytics!

If you parse this, "have now seen" != "today has active"

Excellent! It's my favorite bug catcher on both platforms :).

Question: How Crashlytics (or Fabric) lives? It's free, but how are they making money to survive?

I'm asking because it's an awesome service, and I want to know if they will be free forever, or in some point (like how did happen with Pivotal Tracker) they will charge with an ugly and useless free option.

According to their privacy policy, Crashlytics aggregates the data that's being collected in every app.

"Crashlytics does aggregate information across Developers in a non-personally identifiable way. Such aggregate and anonymous information is used by Crashlytics to (i) improve the Services, (ii) create analysis of trends or behaviors and (iii) other similar uses, but always in an aggregate and anonymous way."

Knowing what apps are trending probably helps Twitter to make decisions on what to focus on next (like with the Meerkat / Periscope apps, and their acquisition of Periscope). That data should probably be enough for Twitter to keep it free for now.

Crashlytics as part of Twitter's Fabric.io suite is awesome. It's our goto for simple things like monitoring crashes/errors, DAU/WAU/MAU and associated ratios across our apps.

It also knocks TestFlight right out of the water for beta testing.

Thanks ksar! Wait until you see what we've been working on ;-)

something something video?

[CENSORED] [REDACTED] [CENSORED] :P

I wanted to do some estimation on what kind of revenue 1M apps could bring but their pricing page consists of "enter your email and we'll contact you shortly".

Seems weird they haven't passed the invite only phase at 1M apps served.

It's not "invite only". It's just a trick to seem exclusive. They have an automated email go out a few minutes after you request an invite that gives you instructions on how to sign up that seems like it's coming from an actual person (unless I'm mistaken, in which case whoever is managing these invites is superhuman).

Yup: http://blog.benhall.me.uk/2015/01/making-users-feel-special-...

If you wait for the animation to load, you'll see that it's free (even for enterprise features). They are owned by twitter (in case you're wondering how it could be free).

Crashlytics is free :-)

This may be a good place to ask: Now that Testflight is gone, what do you recommend for getting crash reports (incl stack trace) in iOS apps? Crashlytics?

Yes, I can heartily recommend Crashlytics/Fabric.io. I used it for my just-released music game app (http://www.reddit.com/r/FlamingNotes) on iOS and Android. Slick integration.

Crashlytics (or Fabric - I wish they'd settle on a name) is now and has always been better than TestFlight imo. Distributing new builds is as simple as archiving (iOS) and clicking a button in your menu bar.

Yes - no brainer. :-)

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