Monitoreo de Fallos

Mobile app monitoring is a crucial component to ensure the continued success of your product in the market. Once your app is available on Google Play, an equally important phase begins: tracking its performance and detecting bugs early. Firebase offers powerful tools like Crashlytics and Google Analytics that allow you to keep control over the user experience and make informed decisions for future updates.

How to monitor critical errors with Firebase Crashlytics?

Crashlytics is an essential tool within the Firebase ecosystem that allows you to identify and analyze bugs occurring in your application. To access this functionality, you must go to the "execution" section in Firebase and select the Crashlytics tab.

In this panel you will find a complete report of all the crashes that your application has experienced. If your application is new or well optimized, you may not see errors immediately. In these cases, it is advisable to force an error to verify that the system is capturing the bugs correctly.

How to force a crash to test Crashlytics?

To make sure Crashlytics is working correctly, you can trigger a controlled error by following these steps:

1. Head to the main class of your application.
2. Right after Firebase initialization, add code to generate a forced error.
3. Compile and run your application.
4. When the application reaches the onCreate() method of the main class, the forced error will be executed.

Once the application closes due to the error, go back to the Crashlytics console and refresh the page. You should see the new error logged in the dashboard.

What information does Crashlytics provide about errors?

When you select a specific error in Crashlytics, you will get detailed information including:

• The exact class where the error occurred
• The precise time of the failure
• The device on which the problem was generated
• The version of the affected build

A particularly useful feature is the integration with Gemini, Google's artificial intelligence, which provides suggestions for fixing the detected bug. These recommendations can save you valuable time in debugging.

How to analyze performance with Google Analytics?

In addition to monitoring bugs, it is critical to understand how users interact with your application. Google Analytics, integrated with Firebase, provides valuable metrics on user behavior.

To access these statistics:

1. Go to Firebase and select the Analytics tab.
2. Enter the main dashboard.

In this dashboard you will find detailed information such as:

• Active users per day
• Most important events (logins, upgrades)
• Frequency of uninstallations or updates
• Geographical distribution of users

It is important to mention that the dashboard displayed in Firebase is a summarized version of Google Analytics. For more in-depth analysis, you can either log in directly to Google Analytics or link an existing account to your application.

How to use the data to improve your application?

Once you have collected information about bugs and user behavior, it's time to create an improvement plan for your next release:

1. Identify the critical bugs that affect the most users.
2. Prioritize fixes based on the impact on user experience.
3. Analyze usage patterns to optimize the most used features.
4. Consider progressively increasing the percentage of users receiving new versions to minimize risks.

If you do not find errors in your Crashlytics dashboard, remember that it is a good practice to force an error to verify that the system is capturing information correctly. This will give you peace of mind that when a real problem occurs, you will be informed.

Constant monitoring of your application will allow you to maintain a high quality of service and respond quickly to any problems that arise. These practices not only improve the user experience, but also contribute significantly to the long-term success of your application in the competitive Google Play market. Have you already implemented these tools in your projects? Share your experience and let's learn together about monitoring best practices.