I would like to know if there is a way in Android to have the application create an information-richer error report in case of a crash.
I’m starting Android development, so I haven’t published anything to the Market yet, but I have read some documentation, including this blog post, about error reporting.
My conclusion looks like the fact that error reports are almost mere stack traces, and while the user has the option to attach system logs, they are analysed by Google only and not by the application developer.
I would like to know if I’m able to attach an application log to the error report. For example, when my software parses an HTML page to grab strings, I would like to attach the full HTML body together with any parsing error that may appear (suppose the website changes some tags… and suppose the site is on a private network that is difficult for me to continuously monitor for page changes).
In general, starting from this example, I would like to read a debug log to help me better understand the circumstances that made the error occur.
Is that possible? And how? I’m not sure that Android Log class is useful even after deployment.
You can generate better error reports by using external frameworks.
One of this frameworks is Crittercism. Crittercism lets you add breadcrumbs and additional data to crashes. This should enable you to log most of the things you need to know to find bugs that are happening in the wild.