App Crashes But No TestFlight Crash Report

Question

I have one user (with an iPhone 5) reporting that my app crashes on launch about 15 seconds after the screen goes black (the splash screen is black). The user downloaded a TestFlight build where I included checkpoints in the App delegate, but I don't get evidence that those checkpoints are crossed, and I never get a crash report.

I changed the entry point on the storyboard to a blank view controller, and now I can see that the checkpoints are being crossed. It's occurred to me that Watchdog is suspending the app due to storyboard resources taking too long to load, but all the images are built in real-time as needed, with the exception of four tiny tab-bar icons. There are several audio files but they are loaded on demand. I can't think of any other resources that could be causing a delay. No one else has reported this problem, and I'm stumped.

Any insight appreciated, especially as to why I'm not seeing a crash report or checkpoints from TestFlight.

Answer 1

Your assumption is correct, the watchdog killed the app. This is because the app doesn't start up properly and either the main thread is blocked or no user interaction is possible since no UI is loaded.

As I understand your description, you are creating the resources while loading? And probably doing this on the main thread? You should try to offload resource hungry code into a background thread instead of doing this on the main thread where older/slower devices could take much longer than expected. The UI should always be responsive, the main thread should never ever to tasks that could get anywhere close to one second of processing.

Another reason could be that the link between the storyboard and the view controller is broken and it actually never loads on that device type.

But without more details it is impossible to say what exactly is going on.

In general: If the app is killed by the iOS system, eg by the watchdog due to startup time exceeding or due to allocating too much memory, then only iOS can generate a crash report.

The problem is that the app gets killed and in that case the process is killed. And that cannot be detected by any code running inside that process. And since crash reports on iOS, other than the iOS system based crash reporter, do run inside the same app process that is being killed, they cannot report or write any crash report.

The following page gives some more details on this: http://support.hockeyapp.net/kb/how-tos-faq/which-types-of-crashes-can-be-collected-on-ios-and-os-x (Though with context to PLCrashReporter, which is not used by Testflight. But the general statements are identical)