When we published our Android app we decided to use Airbrake as a 3rd party exception reporting service. I integrated the loopj Airbrake notifier (https://github.com/loopj/airbrake-android) into our app and it seemed to be doing fairly well.
Over the past two weeks we have seen an explosion in downloads and as a result an increase in exceptions being reported. I was getting some really weird exceptions so I decided to look at the Android Developer Console for the application in Google Play. The interesting thing I found was that the number of errors in the Google Play dashboard was less than 10% of the total number I have in Airbrake. Then I decided to double check with Flurry. The number of exceptions that Flurry seems to have encountered is similar to what Airbrake is showing me, which leads me to believe that Flurry gathers these stats in the same way as Airbrake.
So what I want to know and cannot find any good answers to:
- What is Google / Android doing differently than a normal uncaught exception handler?
- Should I just throw Airbrake out and use the Google Play error reporting only? (Our app does go back to 2.1, but we can live with that)
Among other things, they only log the exception to the server if the user clicks the “Report…” button, AFAIK. Since many users will not do that, you will get a subset of the actual exceptions that occur.