IOS Crash key points

Some key points to remember:

If your app crashes, the first thing is to figure out exactly where it crashed and why. Once you know these two things, fixing the crash is often easy. The debugger can help you with this, but you need to understand how to make it work for you.

Some crashes appear to happen randomly, and these are the tough ones, especially when you’re working with multiple threads. Most of the time, however, you can find a consistent way to make your app crash every time you try it.

If you can figure out how to reproduce the crash with a minimal number of steps, then you’ll also have a good way to verify that the bug was fixed (i.e. it won’t happen again). But if you cannot reliably reproduce the error, then you can never be certain that your changes have made it go away.

Tips:

• If the app crashes on main.m, then set the Exception Breakpoint.
• With the Exception Breakpoint enabled, you may no longer get a useful error message. In that case, either resume the app until you do, or type the “po $eax” command after the debug prompt.
• If you get an EXC_BAD_ACCESS, enable Zombie Objects and try again.
• The most common reason for crashes and other bugs are missing or bad connections in your nibs or storyboards. These usually don’t result in compiler errors and may therefore be hidden from sight.
• Don’t ignore compiler warnings. If you have them, they’re often the reason why things go wrong. If you don’t understand why you get a certain compiler warning, then figure that out first. These are life savers!
• Debugging on the device can be slightly different from debugging on the simulator. These two environments are not exactly the same and you’ll get different results.

  For example, when I ran the Problems app on my iPhone 4, the very first crash happened in the NSArray initialization because of the missing nil sentinel, and not because the app was calling setList:on the wrong view controller. That said, the same principles apply for finding the root causes of your crashes.

And don’t forget the static analyzer tool, which will catch even more mistakes. If you’re a beginner, I recommend that you always enable it. You can do this from the Build Settings panel for your project: