App developers and the App crash reports

A former Nexus device maintainer and currently a Yahooer, JBQ, started an interesting discussion yesterday on Google+. Modified firmware and bug reports of apps submitted by users of such modified firmware. The question is simple: should the app developers heed crash logs from users who are using custom or modified ROMs. One thing we know for sure is that these days customizing the phone’s firmware is very common. Enthusiasts with some knowledge about this and the attached guide change the pre-installed ROM of their phone. This becomes a source of compatibility issues with some of the third party apps.

The very popular Xposed Module allows a user to modify the look and feel, behaviour and various other aspects of Android OS. What it also does is that, it can change, add or remove few of the components which the 3^rd party apps might be using in some way or other but don’t hold it accountable. And unless the developer gets a detailed report from the affected device they can not determine the exact cause of the crash. Without the cause they are left with no course of action for resolving the issue because guessing won’t work in such scenario wherein the phone can be running on any combination of modules.

Even if someone has just tweaked the Android OS ecosystem a bit and if it is spread amongst few hundreds or thousands users then that also can lead to dozens of bugs and crash reports. So even without the Xposed framework being used the android app developer is put in huge problem by the users tweaking with their OS. Without the logs, the only way to find the problem is getting hold of the affected phone and the customized ROM, which is not a trivial task.

So, what a developer should do? Ignore all the crash reports, consider each and every report and work on it or somewhere in between, he should look into the popular modifications’ support and ignore the rest?

Do share your thoughts in the comments section.