Sentry has announced a new software development kit and native development kit for Android developers. The new kits aims to bring mobile application error monitoring to the Android operating system.
According to a recently released report, mobile users are expected to grow to 7 billion by 2021 with annual mobile app downloads projected to reach 258 billion by 2022. However, developers will need more than downloads in order to achieve app success. Without proper tools to help them identify and address errors quickly, developers are at risk of app crashes and damaged brand reputation, the company explained.
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“App crashes cause more than 70% of uninstalls, and Google ranking algorithms now downrank apps with stability problems, so uptime and performance are critical for companies to remain successful and competitive in the mobile world,” said David Cramer, co-founder and CEO of Sentry. “The challenge for mobile application developers is the lack of visibility and control over the devices. And on Android, flaws in your native code, third-party dependencies or, in rare cases, even in the system libraries, can bring down the entire application.”
According to the company, the SDK and NDK feature the ability to trace bugs all the way into native libraries, provides information about the phone, and automatically collects the state of the phone. In addition, every crash and report is captured in real time, and developers can attack context information related to the error such as breadcrumbs, tags and other details.
“Errors aren’t platform-agnostic, so why should your error-monitoring services be? Sentry support for mobile, coupled with proven support for web, gives developers a complete picture, which is key in today’s complex application-centric landscape,” said Cramer. “Modern applications are not self-contained—they have multiple runtimes across the stack, causing added complexity in monitoring. While most application error monitoring solutions focus on just one platform, Sentry provides unmatched value across web, mobile and native applications.”
Other features include the ability to see the kinds of phones impacted and specific actions a user took, and an API to add application-specific data and events to crash reports. Sentry for Mobile is also available for iOS, React Mobile, Flutter and other mobile platforms.
