Announcing the release of Android error tracking support!

We’re extremely pleased to report the release of our official Raygun provider for Android! Raygun4Android brings first-class Android error tracking support to Android mobiles, tablets and other devices. Now you can automatically track errors and crashes from your user’s Android devices without lifting a finger.

Engineered for ease of use

As you’d expect, the provider is written in Java and supports all Android devices which have Gingerbread or newer installed (version 2.3/SDK level 9). It’s been designed to make the developer’s job as simple as possible to get it up and running. It only takes two lines of code and a few more lines pasted in to your AndroidManifest.xml, then it’s ready to go – all uncaught exceptions will be automatically sent to the Raygun service (you, of course, can send caught exceptions too if you want).

From there, they’re visible on the slick Raygun dashboard. You get full exception data including the stack trace, hardware environment data including device version, SDK, screen dimensions, orientation and much more! Of course, our much loved custom data support is in the box too – you can send any custom data and tags along with an exception.

Version tracking is integrated and I’m looking forward to sharing details about our new version tracking system in a future post. We’ll also debuting a new Raygun feature in this provider – unique user tracking. We’ll be making a big announcement about this shortly for all our providers so look out for that! On the down-low, it lets you track impacted users so you can understand the audience impact of a crash (if your users log in, and your privacy policy makes the user aware, you can even tag those users so you know who they are).

Helping improve app quality

The mobile development ecosystem presents unique challenges for app developers. The key issue we set out to solve is knowing the health of your app out in the wild. Relying on manual feedback puts the onus on your users, which can frustrate them, leading to low ratings and lost sales. Even if your users provide feedback and bug reports, debugging can be a challenge – you probably don’t have access to the logs when you need them! Raygun solves this by automatically sending the stack trace for every error that occurs automatically, along with other data you can use to fix the issue. An additional challenge is device fragmentation – as the device model is visible on the error you have full knowledge even for obscure and intermittent errors.

Raygun4Android’s sensitive to the mobile operating environment, too. If no network is available, error data will be cached until it becomes available, saving battery and network costs. The last 32 exceptions will be stored on the device and retransmitted when possible.

Try it out now

Got an Android app? The provider’s ready to go now for all development environments. If you use Maven, there’s a package available from Central that you can add to your pom.xml. Full instructions are available from the GitHub repository and when you create a new application in Raygun.

If you use Ant, another build tool or want to try it out manually, you can grab the JAR – again, instructions available from the GitHub page.

Contributing

We have significant plans to continue evolving the Android provider. Like all of our error providers, the Android provider is licensed under the MIT license and we do encourage reporting issues and sending pull requests.

Come on in, the water is fine!

If you’ve got a Raygun account you can add the new provider to your Android app and be up in running in seconds.

Don’t have a Raygun account? There’s a 14-day, no credit card free trial available here. Give it a spin; we think you’ll be amazed at what Raygun can tell you about your application’s data. Let us know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions. Until next time!