

Crashlytics, A Crash-Reporting Solution For Mobile Developers, Raises $1 Million - ttol
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/crashlytics-a-crash-reporting-solution-for-mobile-developers-raises-1-million/

======
makira
I find it incredible that it is possible to raise $1 million for something
with no revenues, little barrier to entry, and that can be written by a very
good hacker or two in a few months... Maybe I'm missing something. Anyway,
congrats to them!

I'm just wondering how much one could raise revenues doubling twice in the
last 2 years and more than half a million expected in the next 12 months.

~~~
DenisM
Few months? A week or two, maybe, because the heavy lifting has already been
done by one very nice fellow Landon Fuller who open-sourced his work as
PLCrashreporter: <http://code.google.com/p/plcrashreporter/>

I've been using it for about 2 years now (even submitted a patch or two), and
I have a pretty good grip on my crashes. When you use it for a while you
realize you don't really need the statistical analysis of the crash reports,
because you end up having no crashes if you fix the problems as soon as they
show up.

So yeah, if you have a crash reporting problem just add PLCrashreporter to
your project, add a file upload code (to your S3 bukket) and look through them
regularly. That's all it takes.

~~~
ttol
PLCrashReporter is great. We've built many things on top of PLCR. A sliver of
the many things we've built on the SDK side:

    
    
      - transparent symbolication so that you get the exact line of code
      - compatibility with ARC in iOS 5
      - we handle both fatal and non-fatal exceptions
      - detect low-memory warnings
      - and much more
    

We also took the time to make our small SDK compatible with others so mobile
devs can just drop us in easily.

Beyond that, there's a whole other world to consider outside the SDK. For
example, since we want to make sure devs don't need to ship with debug symbols
built in (30-50% increase in app size), we have done all the heavy lifting
instead of shifting that to the developer (and then to the user).

In terms of just dumping the logs to an S3 bucket, that may work initially,
but once you start getting tons of crash reports, the real problem starts --
how to make sense of it all. We also wanted the filename and the line of code
that it crashed on, but this wasn't terribly easy to do. We ran into these
issues ourselves and decided to build an elegant solution to this problem.

We're excited about this space and have been deeply involved in it. Great
stuff to announce soon that should shed more light!

~~~
Nevyns
what does compatibility with ARC mean exactly?

~~~
jseibert
ARC is Apple's new scheme for memory management (more info here:
[http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/Objecti...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/ObjectiveC/RN-
TransitioningToARC/_index.html)) and there are a bunch of requirements (see
"ARC Enforces New Rules") that have to be met for an app to be ARC-compatible.
Our SDK also has to follow those rules in order be used painlessly in an ARC-
based app.

------
Mizza
Heh. I built something like this about 6 months ago. And they got a million
dollars.

 _scratches chin_

------
bensack
A great lightweight solution to a universal problem -- there's simply no way
to fully test an app for all the possible environmental conditions that might
cause errors (prior to a release). I like that the SDK is microscopic and
doesn't require apps to ship with debug symbols. Debug symbols can increase
the size of an app exponentially, so this is a huge space saver. Wayne and
Jeff know software, and I wouldn't expect anything less than an elegant
utility that does what is needed, and doesn't bloat up the app and cause
errors of its own. I expect great things from these guys.

~~~
ttol
Thanks! We really wanted to make sure our users get the best of both worlds -
we symbolicate crash reports, provide device insights, and much more, without
forcing devs to ship with debug symbols (which ends up bloating their app).

------
DenisM
So, technology aside, how do you plan to sell this thing? Larger developers
have this problem nailed down already, so that leaves medium and small
developers for you. Do you have plans to reach the masses? _That_ would be a
very interesting innovation.

------
pun279
This could very easily trim out months of debugging that we have to do with
releases across platforms, Looking forward to giving it a run through our dev
cycles

------
victoriasong
stay tuned; I've gotten a sneak peak of the product, and you'll be blown away
by how useful and simple it is. When I showed it to mobile app dev
friends(who've tried to build this themselves), they all said that they needed
this yesterday.

------
tuan617
Incredibly smart and complementary founding team. If our enterprise apps used
Crashlytics, I'd probably not lose so much productivity over crashes and
updates that dont seem to fix anything.

------
mbesto
Is this like TestFlight[1] but for apps that are already in consumers hands?
(i.e. not BETA testing)

[1]<https://testflightapp.com/>

------
andrewmlevy
Congrats guys, welcome to the space!

-Team Crittercism

------
KB
Wow, their landing page is pretty slick. Check out their app thingy on the
inside page.

