This is an interesting and unexpected one. This kind of acquisition by a large company like Microsoft has a bit of a bad track record of success but I'm going to remain hopeful that with Microsoft being much more open to other platforms these days, that this won't be the end of Hockey on iOS. Congratulations to everyone involved!
Colin Donnell on Hockey and its live crash reporting features. I use TestFlight rather than Hockey but they recently added the same feature to their SDK (which hit 1.0 this week). Wouldn't it be nice if iTunes Connect had this level of crash reporting and we didn't need a 3rd party library?
Attaching NSLogger Logs to HockeyApp Crash Reports
While crash logs can be extremely helpful, sometimes you need just a little more information to find that bug. Tim Brückmann writes about how to get NSLogger log data encoded and attached to your HockeyApp crash reports. Viewing the data after it has been submitted is a bit of a pain but this could certainly be useful if you are trying to track down an awkward bug.
Hockey just gets better and better. This new companion app for Hockey allows you to dig into your crash reports and once connected to your git repository and attached to the relevant tag or commit can show you the lines of source responsible for the issue. Remember when it used to be hard to find the source of crashes that were happening in the wild?
Visual Studio App Center Retirement
I’m sad to see the retirement of Microsoft’s App Center as it means the end of the timeline for HockeyApp, which was always my favourite way to distribute apps for testing before Apple released their integration of the competing TestFlight service¹. The retirement makes perfect sense, of course, since both Apple and Google have fantastic pre-release distribution systems, and Microsoft gives details of other services that people can use for the other pieces of functionality it had. I was sceptical but also hopeful when the acquisition happened, but it turned out much better than expected. I doubt many of you were using App Center in 2024, but I link to this announcement mainly because I want to give one more link to HockeyApp. 🫡
¹ One of the rare occurrences where Apple purchased a company and didn’t rebrand it. There are others, like Siri, Beats, and Shazam, but they are few and far between.
Overview of iOS Crash Reporting Tools
Cesare Rocchi has written up this overview of crash reporting tools from Crashlytics, Crittercism, Bugsense, TestFlight and HockeyApp. I use HockeyApp for our crash reporting and it does a great job at it but reading this article I particularly liked the sound of the Crittercism feature of integrating analytics with crash reporting so that alongside the crash report you can see a breadcrumb trail of analytics information collected along the way. Useful.
Things have been pretty quiet from HockeyApp since the acquisition by Microsoft almost 3 years ago (time really does fly!) but this week saw a relaunch of it as part of App Center from Microsoft. There are still echoes of the old HockeyApp that remain but this is very much a changed service, with much more functionality. The cloud based testing service looks especially interesting.
Note: Yes, this is also this week's sponsored link but I'd have linked to this story anyway and so I figured I should still do that.
Want to automatically build, test, and release your apps? Try App Center
From the creators of HockeyApp: Ship better apps faster by connecting your app's GitHub repo and automating the rest! After pushing new code, App Center can build your app in the cloud, test it on thousands of real iOS devices using XCUITest, release to beta testers or the App Store, and monitor production with crash reports and analytics. Sign up now.
Get a sneak peek at the new App Center iOS Tester App
We're excited to announce that HockeyApp for App Center, our native iOS app, is now available! The app enables you to instantly distribute the latest and greatest iOS app builds to your beta testers faster, and with fewer clicks, so you and your testers can focus on testing and improving user experience. Get started with the preview.