How to troubleshoot iOS crash when device is unavailable

Hi,

This has been a problem we've avoided for years. When an error occurs on an iOS device (and Android too for that matter), our usual process to fix the problem is to plug the device in locally and debug within Xcode or adb. Sometimes we have theories or we're aware of changes that likely led to the problem and usually we can figure out the issue.

We also use remote error reporting systems including Cloud Diagnostics from Unity and our own home brewed error reporting system to capture errors serverside and identify and fix problems that way.

Unfortunately these systems fall short when working with specific user in a remote location. Today I faced a backlog of issues that had stacked up from reports we received last week and I found that for most of the cases all we have is a report that user's device just crashes on startup or shortly there after.

Even though we have several test devices in house we are often unable to reproduce specific issues like these for certain users. On other platforms like Steam we can easily obtain an output log and troubleshoot, but on iOS, if we can't access the user's device and if we can't reproduce the problem with our own devices or simulator we have very few options to trouble shoot.

Usually our process goes toward a guess and check flow at that point where we try different things and follow up with the user over time, but this hasn't worked well and is a massive time waste.

It seems like there must be a more obvious way to get crash type errors from specific remote devices. Cloud Diagnostics hasn't been sufficient because even if an error is reported there, we don't know which error the specific user is having. We're probably missing something obvious here that could help.

If anyone has a better process to address this general problem we would appreciate it.
Thanks!

 

I’m in a similar situation. Have you tried the CrashReport Unity API at all?
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/CrashReport.html