Twitter’s Mobile Crash Reporting Tool Crashlytics Arrives On Android

As promised at the time of its acquisition by Twitter, mobile crash reporting tool Crashlytics has not stopped development. In February, it opened up its enterprise features to all for free, and today the company released the long-awaited solution for Android devices with the launch of the Android SDK.

Twitter’s Android engineers have been beta testing the new product, which offers a similar feature set to the iOS version, and includes things like fully automated deobfuscation, logged exceptions, condensed crash reporting, IDE integration with Eclipse, IntelliJ and Android Studio (beta) on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms – the details of which are all available here on the Crashlytics company blog announcing the SDK’s arrival.

(For non-developers, what the above means is that the tool set is really good at spotting bugs and making sense of them, and has been designed to easily integrate into a developer’s current workflow).

Crashlytics founder Wayne Chang explains that crash detection and reporting is a tough problem to solve, also noting that it’s “particularly” complex on Android. “Given the complexities of crash reporting, Android’s explosive growth, and the myriad of devices, it was important for us to build the most powerful, lightweight crash reporting solution for the Android platform,” he states in the post.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s Engineering blog offers a deeper dive into some of the challenges that Crashlytics helped them solve over the past months, ahead of it actually acquiring the service. For instance, Twitter engineers were once perplexed by crashes that were affecting a small number of users, and the Crashlytics tool set eventually helped them figure out those users were on jailbroken iOS devices.

Ben Sandofsky, Twitter’s tech lead for Twitter for Mac (previously iOS), also explained that while iTunes Connect helps with crash reports for production builds of the app, Crashlytics has been able to help the company with crash reporting for its internal “dogfood” builds – and this, in turn, helps the company reduce the feedback cycle and ship a better version for users, he says.

At the time of the acquisition, Crashlytics had already been making a name for itself among mobile app developers, including not only inside Twitter (and Twitter-owned Vine), but also with big-name brands. The company now offers services to thousands of companies, including Yelp, Kayak, PayPal, Walmart, Groupon, Waze, 500px, Yammer, Blackboard, Path, OpenTable, Domino’s, Expedia, Square and more.

The new Android SDK is available here.