Under the Bridge

OK, maybe it doesn’t quite count as a “tip” exactly to tell you to read an Apple tech note, specifically

Technical Note TN2151
Crash Reporting for iPhone OS Applications

… but just in case you haven’t stumbled across it so far, there’s a particular point that you need to be aware of before you submit your next iPhone application build to Apple, which we figure pushes this into the tip-worthy category:

…Unlike crash logs from Mac OS X, iPhone OS logs do not contain symbol information when they’re written out. You have to “symbolicate” iPhone OS logs before you can analyze them.

Symbolication – resolving stack trace addresses to source code methods and lines – requires the application binary that was uploaded to the App Store and the .dSYM file that was generated when that binary was built. This must be an exact match – otherwise, the report cannot be symbolicated. It’s essential that you keep each build distributed to any users (regardless of mechanism) with its .dSYM file.

IMPORTANT: You must keep both the application binary and the .dSYM file in order to be able to fully symbolicate crash reports. You should archive these files for every build that you submit to iTunes Connect. The .dSYM and application binary are specifically tied together on a per-build-basis, and subsequent builds, even from the same source files, will not interoperate with files from other builds.

Given a crash report, the matching binary, and its .dSYM file, symbolication is relatively easy…

Now you know!