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Fatal Issues & Crashes: Overview

What are Fatal Issues?

Fatal issues represent unhandled exceptions and crashes that cause an app to terminate. These may stem from uncaught runtime errors, system-level signals, or fatal errors in native code. In bitdrift, a fatal issue is automatically detected and grouped based on exception type, stack trace, and crash signature. bitdrift enables capturing the full session context—network activity, logs, and user interactions—that led to the failure.

Use Cases

Fatal issue and crash reporting proves invaluable in many scenarios:

  • Pinpoint Crashes Impacting Real Users: Instantly see which crashes are affecting the most users, sessions, and devices across your mobile fleet.
  • Reproduce Crashes Without Repro Steps: Replay what happened on the user’s device—screen interactions, network calls, and app state—right up to the moment of the crash.
  • Diagnose Issues in Real Mobile Environments: Analyze human-readable stack traces alongside actual device logs, OS versions, and session context—no emulators needed.
  • Track Stability by Release and Platform: Monitor crash trends across iOS and Android, broken down by app version, device type, and OS version.
  • Fix and Verify Faster: Use real crash sessions to reproduce and debug, then confirm fixes in production as new sessions come in.
  • Collaborate Across Mobile Teams: Share crash reports that include the full story—from stack trace to user journey—so QA, dev, and PMs are all on the same page.
  • Catch Mobile-Specific Failures Early: Spot issues like permission denials, background crashes, or device-specific bugs as soon as they appear in the wild.

Key Functionality

bitdrift’s fatal issue and crash reporting includes:

  • Issue Grouping: bitdrift automatically groups related issues, helping you surface the most impactful problems while minimizing noise from duplicates.
  • Issue Filtering: Narrow your view with filters for platform, app version, timeframe, and trend data.
  • Custom Views: Create, save and share filtered views tailored to your team’s priorities.
  • Impact Summary: Quickly assess scope and severity with metrics for impacted users, sessions, total events, and representative stack traces.
  • Stack Trace View: Dive into symbolicated and de-obfuscated stack traces from sample crash events, with line-level detail and thread context.
  • Session Timeline Integration: Stack traces are shown alongside session timelines, replays, and spans—so you can understand what led to the crash, not just where it occurred.

See the Issues Feature Guide for a comprehensive walkthrough of all the features.