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Crashlytics, A Crash-Reporting Solution For Mobile Developers, Raises $1 Million

23 points by ttol 15y ago

bensack 15y ago
A great lightweight solution to a universal problem -- there's simply no way to fully test an app for all the possible environmental conditions that might cause errors (prior to a release). I like that the SDK is microscopic and doesn't require apps to ship with debug symbols. Debug symbols can increase the size of an app exponentially, so this is a huge space saver. Wayne and Jeff know software, and I wouldn't expect anything less than an elegant utility that does what is needed, and doesn't bloat up the app and cause errors of its own. I expect great things from these guys.
- ttol 15y ago
  Thanks! We really wanted to make sure our users get the best of both worlds - we symbolicate crash reports, provide device insights, and much more, without forcing devs to ship with debug symbols (which ends up bloating their app).
- daveambrose 15y ago
  Agreed. HUGE problem for app developers and this looks to be a very simple and focused solution - something that's so key to get traction from the start.
makira 15y ago
I find it incredible that it is possible to raise $1 million for something with no revenues, little barrier to entry, and that can be written by a very good hacker or two in a few months... Maybe I'm missing something. Anyway, congrats to them! I'm just wondering how much one could raise revenues doubling twice in the last 2 years and more than half a million expected in the next 12 months.
- ttol 15y ago
  Thanks, I think! ;-)
- pagekalisedown 15y ago
  Good question. Sounds to me like they've simply made the output of backtrace() available online.
  - jseibert 15y ago
    Getting the back trace is not the hard part. When you get tens of thousands or millions of them, they become useless very quickly. The real work is in de-duplicating, coalescing, and analyzing the backtraces to tell you the insights you need, including the exact line number of code that caused the crash. Pro tip: It's usually not line 0 of the backtrace :)
    - nupark2 15y ago
      Actually, getting the backtrace sounds like a pretty difficult part: http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/objc/Reliable_Crash_Reporting.20110912.html http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/objc/Reliable_Crash_Repor...
      - jseibert 15y ago
        You're right - it's extremely difficult, but what I was trying to get at is that it's only the beginning of the complexity. Landon has done incredible work in this area and we are incredibly grateful he has shared his work with the world - it very much inspired a good chunk of what we do. We have taken things further, though, and updated his techniques to work more robustly with LLVM3 and ARC, added non-fatal exception handling etc. All of this must be done extremely carefully, using async-safe code that is tuned to minimize memory footprint. It's not trivial, but it's worth the effort on our end to deliver the best product we can. We're huge proponents of PLCR and I wouldn't discourage anyone from using it directly. In fact, we're 100% compatible with it, if you wish to run us and PLCR at the same time, side-by-side. The benefits to using our system, apart from the significant aggregation and analysis we do, is that we actively maintain and update our report collection to support the latest iOS and compiler capabilities, so you don't have to worry about that. Hope this helps!
Mizza 15y ago
Heh. I built something like this about 6 months ago. And they got a million dollars. scratches chin
KB 15y ago
Wow, their landing page is pretty slick. Check out their app thingy on the inside page.
pun279 15y ago
This could very easily trim out months of debugging that we have to do with releases across platforms, Looking forward to giving it a run through our dev cycles
mbesto 15y ago
Is this like TestFlight[1] but for apps that are already in consumers hands? (i.e. not BETA testing) [1]https://testflightapp.com/ https://testflightapp.com/
DenisM 15y ago
So, technology aside, how do you plan to sell this thing? Larger developers have this problem nailed down already, so that leaves medium and small developers for you. Do you have plans to reach the masses? That would be a very interesting innovation.
tuan617 15y ago
Incredibly smart and complementary founding team. If our enterprise apps used Crashlytics, I'd probably not lose so much productivity over crashes and updates that dont seem to fix anything.
andrewmlevy 15y ago
Congrats guys, welcome to the space! -Team Crittercism
victoriasong 15y ago
stay tuned; I've gotten a sneak peak of the product, and you'll be blown away by how useful and simple it is. When I showed it to mobile app dev friends(who've tried to build this themselves), they all said that they needed this yesterday.

23 points by ttol 15y ago

A great lightweight solution to a universal problem -- there's simply no way to fully test an app for all the possible environmental conditions that might cause errors (prior to a release). I like that the SDK is microscopic and doesn't require apps to ship with debug symbols. Debug symbols can increase the size of an app exponentially, so this is a huge space saver. Wayne and Jeff know software, and I wouldn't expect anything less than an elegant utility that does what is needed, and doesn't bloat up the app and cause errors of its own. I expect great things from these guys.

ttol 15y ago
Thanks! We really wanted to make sure our users get the best of both worlds - we symbolicate crash reports, provide device insights, and much more, without forcing devs to ship with debug symbols (which ends up bloating their app).
daveambrose 15y ago
Agreed. HUGE problem for app developers and this looks to be a very simple and focused solution - something that's so key to get traction from the start.

makira 15y ago

I find it incredible that it is possible to raise $1 million for something with no revenues, little barrier to entry, and that can be written by a very good hacker or two in a few months... Maybe I'm missing something. Anyway, congrats to them! I'm just wondering how much one could raise revenues doubling twice in the last 2 years and more than half a million expected in the next 12 months.

ttol 15y ago
Thanks, I think! ;-)
pagekalisedown 15y ago
Good question. Sounds to me like they've simply made the output of backtrace() available online.
- jseibert 15y ago
  Getting the back trace is not the hard part. When you get tens of thousands or millions of them, they become useless very quickly. The real work is in de-duplicating, coalescing, and analyzing the backtraces to tell you the insights you need, including the exact line number of code that caused the crash. Pro tip: It's usually not line 0 of the backtrace :)
  - nupark2 15y ago
    Actually, getting the backtrace sounds like a pretty difficult part: http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/objc/Reliable_Crash_Reporting.20110912.html http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/objc/Reliable_Crash_Repor...
    - jseibert 15y ago
      You're right - it's extremely difficult, but what I was trying to get at is that it's only the beginning of the complexity. Landon has done incredible work in this area and we are incredibly grateful he has shared his work with the world - it very much inspired a good chunk of what we do. We have taken things further, though, and updated his techniques to work more robustly with LLVM3 and ARC, added non-fatal exception handling etc. All of this must be done extremely carefully, using async-safe code that is tuned to minimize memory footprint. It's not trivial, but it's worth the effort on our end to deliver the best product we can. We're huge proponents of PLCR and I wouldn't discourage anyone from using it directly. In fact, we're 100% compatible with it, if you wish to run us and PLCR at the same time, side-by-side. The benefits to using our system, apart from the significant aggregation and analysis we do, is that we actively maintain and update our report collection to support the latest iOS and compiler capabilities, so you don't have to worry about that. Hope this helps!

Mizza 15y ago

Heh. I built something like this about 6 months ago. And they got a million dollars. scratches chin

KB 15y ago

Wow, their landing page is pretty slick. Check out their app thingy on the inside page.

pun279 15y ago

This could very easily trim out months of debugging that we have to do with releases across platforms, Looking forward to giving it a run through our dev cycles

mbesto 15y ago

Is this like TestFlight[1] but for apps that are already in consumers hands? (i.e. not BETA testing) [1]https://testflightapp.com/ https://testflightapp.com/

DenisM 15y ago

So, technology aside, how do you plan to sell this thing? Larger developers have this problem nailed down already, so that leaves medium and small developers for you. Do you have plans to reach the masses? That would be a very interesting innovation.

tuan617 15y ago

Incredibly smart and complementary founding team. If our enterprise apps used Crashlytics, I'd probably not lose so much productivity over crashes and updates that dont seem to fix anything.

andrewmlevy 15y ago

Congrats guys, welcome to the space! -Team Crittercism

victoriasong 15y ago

stay tuned; I've gotten a sneak peak of the product, and you'll be blown away by how useful and simple it is. When I showed it to mobile app dev friends(who've tried to build this themselves), they all said that they needed this yesterday.