iOS12 - are you seeing more crashes?

Solar2D iOS
#1

I’ve recently updated several apps using iOS12 beta and with recent Corona builds (2400+). I’ve noticed that there are significantly more crashes reported in Apple dev console for the same amount of sessions. Many of these are on older devices (iPhone6 for example). I could not reproduce crashes on the single test iPad I have (runs ios12, but 2 year old now).

Is anyone else experiencing similar issue?

Also, Is there a way to inspect these crash logs meaningfully? unless i’m missing something on the organizer crash view, there is really no helpful info there.

#2

not one?

#3

hey rune7, I have just stumbled upon your post.

Here’s mine: https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/74330-random-crashes-on-ios-during-startup/

I am seeing a lot of random crashes in analytics and it looks like there’s something wrong inside Corona. The stack traces are coming from within the native code of Corona or i get issues like missing native libraries, while they are loaded at app launch and are never modified. 

More or less the same codebase after update to the latest corona is having a lot of issues.

#4

Hi krystian6,

Thought I was the only one :grinning:. Not many are looking at this so its kind of a hidden issue. for me it translates also to more user complaints via the app feedback page. However, I cant do much with the crash log files I saw. We may need Corona team’s help to investigate further.

#5

Yes, the problem i have - in order to fill in the bug report they ask for a sample code. I have no idea how to create one, especially that in order to actually GET the error, it takes A LOT of tries.

#6

Hi;

Thanks for the info rene7 and krystian6. Your information made me take a closer look at our apps.

We are seeing the same thing as you two. It is not yet showing up in our reviews but the raw crash numbers from Apple are showing significant increases since the inception of iOS 12 and our updates over the last several months. We have been building/updating the apps with Corona Build 3388 and publishing for the iOS SDK labeled “12.0 Beta”.

Like you two, the lack of any ability to reproduce anything or see actual device crash logs is frustrating. So much easier to see problems like this on Android.

I can provide the raw numbers to Corona or an Apple chart of crashes over days . . . if anyone at Corona iwants to see them. 

On a very stable app that has been out for 3 years and which has thousands of daily users (but not tens of thousands), the number of crashes per day has gone from an average of 3.48 per day to 32.27 per day. And this is Apple’s “opt-in” reporting which is less than half of all users.

Very very worrisome.

Steve

#7

We really need to have something to go on. 

Also please don’t be confused by the “Beta” label. The verisons of Corona that are labeled “iOS 12 Beta” is actually using the iOS 12.0 Gold Master. The “Beta” label was purely internal to Corona. It’s not an Apple Beta SDK. Apple wouldn’t allow you to submit apps if that was the case.

Since I have nothing I can take to engineering and knowing that Apple has already pushed out a new Xcode and iOS 12.1 SDK, perhaps your best course of action is to grab a daily build after we enabled 12.1, update your Xcode (don’t forget to launch it and let it install it’s extras) and re-release your app against the 12.1 SDK.

Rob

#8

Hi Rob;

Yeah, I understand that we are all blind on this thus far.

Thanks for the advice.

Steve

#9

Rob,

Since Corona is collecting analytics on all apps, you may have more info than us on that. I’m not sure the errors are random. Because we are running on optimized code we don’t see proper stack to investigate. Unfortunately the symbols file I tried to upload to flurry, my analytics provider, was not helpful (we got the symbols file from apple developer console). 

I can tell you that for my leading game, based on apple opt in info, crashes have tripled following the latest update compared to previous period, while session number increased by only 20%. This is a clear sign that something is wrong. This is a game with thousands of daily sessions so its not a sporadic occurrence. According to their data, testing on iPad with iOS 12 has the best chance to reproduce these issues for my game (though we couldn’t reproduce it with our iPad so far). 

#10

We are not collecting much more than “did the app start”. So that’s not going to be much help.

You might want to enable having us keep the symbols around. See:

http://docs.coronalabs.com/guide/distribution/advancedSettings/index.html#build-control

Also have you updated to a Corona build that has iOS 12.1 as the base SDK?

Rob

#11

The last update of the app was on Oct 5th with the 2400 build and beta flag. We will probably only update again if we have good indication of significant improvement to this matter.

#12

I don’t know what you mean by the 2400 build? Our build numbers are in the 3400 range. The 11/3 build (3426) is the first build with iOS 12.1. We cannot go back in time and fix builds. Any fixes would go into a new daily build, which would require you to use the 12.1 SDK.

You have two choices, update with your current version and turn on the symbol retention or update to 3426 or later and resubmit using the iOS 12.1 SDK and see if that addresses your issues.

Rob

#13

My last update to cuadros was Nov 7th. I used the latest daily build from that day. I have not seen any significant crashes anywhere. Not sure if the issue pops up with more volume. My apps and cuadros are on the small side, I only do about 2K sessions a day for cuadros. 

Crashes from apple:

Flurry has 0 crashes for the same time period so I didn’t include the picture.

Daily sessions:

iOS version for the same time period:

#14

@Rob, Obviously meant 3400. going back in time would be really nice though I wouldn’t spend it on rebuilding APKs…

Has the team made any fixes or changes for 12.1 that are likely related to this matter? If not, than there is hardly a reason to expect an improvement is there? We do not want to needlessly bother our clients with updates unless they offer some improvement.

@agramonte, that’s encouraging. Perhaps the problem is more specific than I initially thought, though it may not be easier to pinpoint its origin.

#15

I’m trying to wrap my head around how to provide something “testable” since it’s an intermittent issue. But with few million user base, however, the percentile of users suffering the error may be small, the number is large and we suffer from the negative feedback on the app store.

If you can go to your engineers with something is a question that pops to my mind immediately when i look at one of the errors we have:

how is it possible, that a native library (one declared in AppCoronaDelegate.mm file), could suddenly be missing?

What would it take to happen?

We have a situation where:

  • app starts

  • in willLoadMain method i load my library with custom functions

  • corona sdk starts (so clearly the willLoadMain method has finished successfully)

  • app crashes because the native function cannot be found

And this happens with the scenario I have described in my thread. So my question is, what would it take for something like this to happen? To me, it looks like suddenly the Lua stack is reset or something messes it up.

#16

We have not made any specific iOS 12 fixes because we were until yesterday unaware of any problems and we still don’t have anything to go on.

iOS 12.1 fixed a bunch of bugs in iOS 12.0 in addition to some new features. It’s perfectly logical to think that Apple may have fixed something that was crashing and updating to 12.1 might fix your crashing. Of course, it may not, but with no information to go on, it’s really your only/best choice for where things are now.

@krystian6 are you doing native builds?

#17

Yes, we do.

Also, I would like to mention that the crashes we have seen were coming from devices running iOS 11+, not only 12.

#18

not one?

#19

hey rune7, I have just stumbled upon your post.

Here’s mine: https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/74330-random-crashes-on-ios-during-startup/

I am seeing a lot of random crashes in analytics and it looks like there’s something wrong inside Corona. The stack traces are coming from within the native code of Corona or i get issues like missing native libraries, while they are loaded at app launch and are never modified. 

More or less the same codebase after update to the latest corona is having a lot of issues.

#20

Hi krystian6,

Thought I was the only one :grinning:. Not many are looking at this so its kind of a hidden issue. for me it translates also to more user complaints via the app feedback page. However, I cant do much with the crash log files I saw. We may need Corona team’s help to investigate further.