Having perused many other questions concerning unusual app crashes without any success at solving my problem, I have decided to post this question.
I have an app that crashes at random. Some users (in test) never have crashes, others have an occasional crash. This app is installed via XCode on testers phones, straight from the development machine. The app never crashes when in use, only upon startup a day or two after installation and use.
The app is instrumented with Crashlytics, and no crashes are detected, nor are Out Of Memory warnings. No crash logs are left on the phone after this behavior.
Crashlytics works. I injected test crashes and they were properly detected.
Once the app crashes, it will not restart. The splash screens appears for an instant and then the app closes.
The app uses Core Data and I use ObjectiveRecord https://github.com/supermarin/ObjectiveRecord as the Core Data interface. There are no aborts anywhere in the code (at least none that I added/left in)
The app downloads about 1500 images (photographs) at initialization time, and whenever the photos collection is updated. The filenames are stored in Core Data, not the binary data.
As an experiment, I took the container from the same app on another phone and replaced the container on the defective phone. No difference. Replacing the container on the good phone with the container from the bad phone made no difference either.
If I reinstall the app on the target phone, without deleting the original install, all works as expected. This leads me to believe that I am not suffering from database corruption - obviously, I may be wrong, but if advice can be offered as to how to test this, I will happily accept it.
I am at my wits' end here - any advice as to what the problem might be, or how to diagnose the problem will be gratefully received.
EDIT -- The app is for IOS 9, iphone only.
I shall answer my own question. I have been distributing the app to my 4 testers using a MacBook. I only have one license, and rather than downloading it and moving it between my iMac and MacBook, I was just allowing Xcode to generate a new certificate.
This doesn't work. Ever.
It invalidated all of the copies of the app that I installed.
The moral of the story is: beware of licensing issues - even if you have a license.
and the hint was:
Aug 29 15:48:28 iPhone amfid[170] : /private/var/containers/Bundle/Application/25BE181B-C30F-41FF-87A3-88C8E63BB3B3/TEST.app/TEST not valid: 0xe8008018: The identity used to sign the executable is no longer valid.
Live and learn I guess......
Related
I am currently working an iOS app, nothing serious, just a simple budget tracker. The workflow is the following: coding some new stuff into app => connect my iPhone to my mac => building app with Xcode to my iPhone 6 and my wife's iPhone 6 plus (so two different device!). At this point everything works fine.
But after a while (sometimes just a few days, sometimes weeks), the app suddenly stop working on both devices at the same time, without any foreshadow: We don't update iOS and don't do any changing in the environment, the app just start to do like this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/sized-video-assets-public-v1/wp-content/appadvice-v2-media/2015/07/crash_9b28fddfc26f9f0380f1b0d0b2324018-quarter.gif (but in my case, the app can't reach the first view, crashing immediately after start).
The most weird thing is, the crashing issue starts exactly the same time on both different device, but the "no-problem interval" is never the same: sometimes the crash starts after one day, sometimes after two weeks, etc.
After I rebuild the app to devices with Xcode, the whole thing starts over, and the app works fine for a while.
I already tried these things to debug this problem:
Fixing all the warnings cased by the Swift's frequent syntax change, so my app always free of warnings => same problem still there
Checking the diagnostic debug logs on devices, no logs for the time of crashing
Checking memory usage on startup, its about 25MB on login screen (first view), and the max memory usage is about 38-40MB in the app.
Debugging app with Xcode, but as I mentioned above, there is no errors/warnings, and after the successful build, the app works fine again.
What is happening here?
If application is installed with XCode and you don't have a Paid Program Developer Account, the life expectancy of the app is like 48h approximately
(There is no official time of validity for that)
, for a paid program, it's a few month with the correct certificate. Currently it seems to be approx 60 days.
If you didn't sign your app, it has low life expectancy. It's quite new that Apple allow you to deploy for a free account, but it just for testing purpose (other than simulator), if you want more days to test on device, you have to pay for the developer program.
Hope This will help you...
Do let me know if you have any other query.
I've got an app that uses Core Data that sporadically stops launching so I have to reinstall it using XCode and then it launches again like normal for a while, with all the Core Data information still preserved.
I have seen that an app often stops launching when the target of an app is too low in comparison to the device software version, however this is not so for this app and device (iPhone 6s).
Have you had such an issue before? What do you think could be causing this problem?
There are many, many, many things that could cause an app to fail to launch. You need to narrow things down and collect some data so that you can find out what the problem is and do something about it. Right now you don't even know that it's related to Core Data, you're just guessing.
For a crash on launch, look at the device console and see what messages appear when you try to launch the app and it fails. You can get the device console messages by
Connecting your device to your Mac
Opening Xcode's "Devices" window (cmd-shift-2)
Looking in the bottom half of the window
A better way to watch the console is to use the free iOS Console app.
The problem was that, as mentioned by dan in the comments, the code was being signed for a short period of time (7 days) and so I had to keep re-installing it on the iOS device to keep it working. Thus to keep the app working indefinitely a paid developer account is needed.
Also mentioned in this reddit forum:
https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/4hotx3/news_free_developer_account_installs_reduced_to_7/
I have hundreds of people using my app, but a handful are reporting that the app does not make it past the black launch screen (it immediately closes, before entering into my app). I'm using Crittercism but it's not even getting far enough to catch any exception, which makes it sound like a springboard / backboard problem.
Here's what I've asked the users to do:
Reinstall the app
Delete some apps (to free some space)
Restart the device
None of the above worked. I'm completely at a loss as to what's wrong. The app is in the AppStore and works fine for most users. Furthermore, I can't find anything unique about these users (they're using recent versions of iOS with fairly modern hardware).
Crittercism doesn't show anything, because after the crash - log will be send only at the next launch, so if user doesn't open your app anymore (or can't do it, because he has constant crash).
I advice your to try next ideas:
Do use use keychain or store smth there? It's not cleared after uninstall
Maybe your data is backed up in icloud
Did it begin with the new iOs version (9.0 for example)
Maybe it's some cache problem after installing one version on another,
Can it be the problem of different timezones
Can it be a crash with local settings
If you have feedback with users with crash - contact them and ask about device, iOs version and other
your have crash sections in your itunesconnect profile, maybe there you'll get some information
I've had a fairly large app (50mb) in the App Store for several years now with many updates and thousands of users. Before each release I do a lot of testing, analyzing and beta-testing on all sorts of devices and situations before releasing an update.
Every once in a while I get a horrific bug report that says the app is crashing ALL the time and is completely unusable. What seems to fix this EVERY TIME is telling the user to delete the app, power cycle the device and reinstall the app while under wi-fi.
This means to me that under some unknown circumstances to me, my app is being installed badly. And this has been happening through iOS 4, 5, 6 and now 7.
Is this happening to anyone else? Any known causes or fixes besides my reinstall fix?
To make matters worse, this shows up in a few bad reviews that say the app crashes all the time. All the other reviews are 5 stars! I hate getting blamed for a bad install.
Thanks!
Shot in the dark here, but could it be related to wireless connectivity (ie an API timing out)? Very hard to say without more details.
We developed an app, and it works perfectly on several different emulators and devices, not once crashed, but both times we tried submitting to Apple it gets back to us as "2.1 - apps that crash are rejected" (or something).
I cant seem to find the log from them, or any additional infos. Is the crash log available anywhere? Or just ANY info? They only say that it crashed on an iPad 3rd Gen with iOS 6. We ran on a device like that and it didnt crash for us.
Unfortunately, Apple doesn't provide detailed logs of their review process, although crash logs are sometimes provided, as indicated by #jsd in the comments below.
In theory, crash reports get synchronized with iTunes and can be collected by Apple and provided to you via iTunes Connect, but in practice, that rarely works - or only with large delays.
However, you could integrate some Crash Reporting into your App. Here are a few services that allow you to do that without much hassle:
HockeyApp
Crittercism
BugSense
TestFlight
Crash reporting integration in production versions of my apps have been proven to be very helpful, so I'd highly recommend this. Good crash reporting services provide an SDK to be included in your app, and generate symbolicated, readable, ready-to-use crash reports that make tracking bugs very easy.
As for the cause of your app's crash, here are some basic guesses:
Do you use ARC (Automatic Reference Counting)? You should.
Did you run the Static Analyzer in Xcode (Product ➞ Analyze)?
Did you test with different environments (e.g. internet connection via 3G, WiFi or none at all)?
Have you deleted and reinstalled the app on your device, or did you just update it?