Suggestion for better way to report crashes for mobile apps

Unity's bug reporting tool is designed around reproducibility; it requests an attached project with the steps to reproduce the reported problem. As a developer, I understand the value of this -- how much easier it is to fix bugs that can be reproduced.

But for crashes that occur in the field from a released game, usually all the developer gets is a stack trace, provided by Apple or Google. We don't know what the user was doing at the time of the crash, nor can we say how to reproduce it.

In my experience with Unity's QA department, submitting a stack trace without an accompanying project and steps to reproduce results in an unnecessary email exchange where QA requests the "missing" project and steps, and the developer needs to explain these aren't available.

I think an improvement to the bug reporting tool would be an option for just reporting stack traces. This would encourage developers to be able to quickly submit these traces to go directly to Unity's internal stack trace database, which is hopefully used to track and fix the most common crashes.

I'm not familiar with using Unity for non-mobile development; perhaps this stack trace option would be suitable for other platforms too.

 

Problem is that 90% of times stack trace will lead to your own code / issues.
I can't imagine how that can be useful for UT.

If you do find a bug that can be actually reproduced and caused by engine code, you can submit it.
Otherwise - it's no good.

Some issues raised can also be a sign of hardware malfunction or some chineese counterpart replacement as well.
Not every android device is a good device.

 

That hasn't been my experience at all. 0% of the stack traces I've gotten back originated from my own code.

But yes, developers certainly still need to use discretion about what bugs they submit - even with the existing bug tool - and only submit Unity's issues to Unity.