The data that lead us to the quality of the product in mobile apps
Today a mobile app has thousands, hundreds of thousands of daily users. You have a huge number of users putting your product out there. The good thing is that it will run the most remote use case possible. The bad thing is that one mistake can have catastrophic consequences.
That said, quality assurance is one of the main focuses of atSistemas. From the time the project is conceptualised until it goes into production, without overlooking our quality area. And one of the techniques used to achieve a quality product is error control.
Error handling means that when an error occurs, regardless of the source, the code must be able to detect and react to it in order to continue to provide the best possible user experience. Disaster comes in the form of unhandled errors, errors that at best cause the app to close unexpectedly.
Relating errors and information
There are several solutions on the market that allow you to collect and manage information on each error. The flagship tool is called Firebase Crashlytics.
For some years now, Crashlytics has been an essential part of any professional mobile development. Its integration is extremely simple, with just a few lines of additional code it allows to record in almost real time any error that occurs in applications, in development and production. Thanks to this free tool, it has been possible to adopt predictive correction policies, analyse and monitor possible stability problems and continuously improve the quality of mobile applications.
At atSistemas we use Crashlytics in our native and hybrid projects. And it is in hybrid projects where the know-how of our partners has been key. Crashlytics has support for native iOS and Android technologies, as well as Unity. However, it has serious limitations in hybrid development technologies and within these, particularly in Ionic, one of the technologies that has experienced the greatest boom in recent years. In this case, the information gathered by this tool is very poor and serves little more than to know if an App has some problems without giving precise data on the possible origin of these failures.
To overcome this obstacle, we have developed a library that allows this tool to be included in hybrid applications developed with Ionic, making it possible to obtain accurate and complete traces of possible errors in the web code.
Crashlytics is perfect for unchecked bugs and also allows you to log bugs manually. This is where our error control strategy takes our developments to the next level.
The result
We control and manage errors at runtime. The volume of information we obtain is multiplied and the quality can increase throughout the life of the app.