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Monitoring crashes in your React Native app with Sentry & Expo
In December 2020 JiffyCV went into beta and I got to experience the highs of getting something I’d worked hard on into people’s hands and the lows of those people then reporting app crashing bugs that I hadn’t found during development.
The key to fixing a bug is knowing the exact steps to take to reproduce it and then how those steps cause a deviation in the intended behaviour, but when you’re not experiencing this first hand (and sometimes when you are) it’s incredibly hard to get the information you need to reproduce those steps.
The best way of giving yourself more information about the crash is to use a tool like Sentry that can capture exceptions thrown during the running of the app and log these to a central server.
Sentry then allows you to view the stack traces & additional contextual information needed to diagnose the crash and also allows you to manage crashes so that they only show again after the next release, to fix the issue when it has gone out for instance.
More importantly for me as I’m self-funding the app is that they give you 5000 events a month for free which means that I could roll out the tool for the beta test without having to pay anything.
