Crashlytics is a powerful crash reporting and mobile analytics tool for your organization’s iOS and Android apps. What you’re about to read might sound like an advertisement, but hear me out. It’s not – we LOVE Crashlytics and I’m sure you will too, once you see the tremendous benefits it will bring to your organization.
Firebase Crashlytics is a real time crash reporting tool, it helps you prioritize and fix your most pervasive crashes based on the impact on real users. And it collects this information in the background, without requiring users to submit bug or crash reports.
Oh, and did I mention that it’s free? Yep, free.
Convincing your team to integrate Crashlytics, or any analytics, into your mobile app is a sell – but this should be an easy one. For everyone’s benefit, here are 7 reasons your management team (including the C-Suite) will love you for recommending Crashlytics.
1. Connect New Users & App Sales to Marketing Efforts
The Crashlytics kit includes data that your CMO and marketing manager will love. View graphs and tables showing how many new users download your app each day.
Upward spikes in the graph during the days following a marketing push are a measurable indicator of success when compared to average downloads per day.
2. Spend Less Time Digging Through Source Code to Pinpoint the Cause of a Crash
With Crashlytics, your manager of software development will have a clear view of how many crashes are occurring, and the exact line of code executing when the crash occurred.
Considering that your app may have a few hundred thousand, or millions of lines of code, this is nothing short of finding a needle in a haystack.
How many developer hours could your team save if they knew the exact line of code causing a crash? Ask your VP to sit down and show him or her this:
3. Prioritize Time Spent on Bug Fixes
As you can see in the graph just above and below, Crashlytics reports the number of users affected by each crash. Rather than guessing or wondering which bug fixes should have priority, management can include ‘number of affected users’ in their prioritization decision making.
4. Create a Better User Experience = Increased Positive Reviews
With Crashlytics your team can be proactive about fixing problems. Rather than waiting for negative reviews in the App Store to alert you to bugs or other problems – your team can see these crashes as they happen.
Without app analytics your users are invisible unless they speak up; and your team has no way to understand what happens when your customers put your app to the test.
5. Understand Your App’s Use & Growth
Keep a constant pulse on your users’ behavior…and we mean constant. Crashlytics includes a real time, constantly updating “active users” visual.
To see use over time, Crashlytics includes a daily active users graph:
As more users download your app this graph should trend upwards. Stagnant or declining use is a sign your users are downloading your app, but not continuing to use it over time.
6. Justify the Time & Dollar Investment In Your App
Developing, building and maintaining an app requires a substantial investment of capital. Your organization needs to know the results of that investment.
Unless you have implemented some kind of mobile app analytics, your team will truly have no idea if your app is even being used after download.
The data provided by Crashlytics will be enormously helpful when the C-Suite is asking these questions and needing justification for the money spent…or requested.
7. It’s Free
Crashlytics is not the only mobile app analytics tool on the market, and it’s not the most comprehensive. But, in terms of ease of use, simplicity and price, it gets our thumbs up.
There are no limits to stats like monthly active users, disk space or APIs. No usage costs and you can add as many apps and developer seats as your team needs.
