Listen, App Store lovers, when your apps fail, don’t blame the developers. They’re suffering too. See, the iPhone SDK has a few issues, especially in error collection. While developers can see quite a bit of debug information in XCode, once an application crashes, the report is written to the iPhone and is completely inaccessible. Another problem? The crash report offers no context for the crash.
In Jeffrey’s case, I would want to dump out the internal database that’s in use at the time of the crash. For Alex’s bug, I’d want to track the network requests to Twitter and the corresponding response. It’s easy to add this logging to Twitterrific, but the only way to retrieve the results is if you are a registered developer. There is no way I’m going to ask Jeffrey and Alex to spend $99 and install Xcode just so I can collect some debug output.
So when your applications fail, don’t cry. Buy a latte, go visit your grandmother, and take a few deep breaths. And also petition Apple to offer some reality-grade debugging software for their reality-grade iPhone OS.