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It seems crashes from development started appearing in my Google Play Developer Console.

Sometimes scaring me quite a bit until I realize these are from debugging and not production crashes.

Is there a way to keep crashes that happen while I am developing out of the Google Play Developer Console reporting?

I am also slightly considered about these debug crashes getting reported considering Google is going to start down ranking apps that crash a lot soon.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/google-play-will-now-downrank-poorly-performing-apps/

Sealer_05
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1 Answers1

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The Developer Console only reports crashes from published version numbers (either in alpha, beta or production).

So my solution is very simple:

  1. After publishing a new version, the first thing I do is increase the versionCode in the manifest. And I only use this version number while developing. This way, no crash is sent to the console.
  2. Then, when I'm ready to publish again, I increase the versionCode once more. This way I make sure new crashes will only come from the published version.

EDIT:

As pointed out in the comments, crashes from unpublished versions will still appear on the console under the 'All versions' option. So take this answer as a way to identify and filter those crashes, not to prevent them from being logged.

jmart
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    Unfortunately that doesn't work either. I just noticed a crash at the Play Console from a version code that was not released. You will just have to select to view the crashes from all versions. This means that even unpublished version codes send the crash log to the Play Console. – steliosf Mar 03 '18 at 03:07
  • @MScott You're right. I forced a crash in my app to test this and after a while it appeared on the console when selecting 'All versions'. I'll edit my answer to reflect this. – jmart Mar 03 '18 at 12:14
  • Yes, unfortunately. It's still useful since you can filter the messages so that you know what are the actual crashes from real users. But it's very frustrating that Google hasn't addressed this issue yet. – steliosf Mar 06 '18 at 02:01
  • @Starwave Not that I know – jmart Mar 03 '20 at 08:27
  • Any news on this behavior? – lubrum Apr 28 '21 at 14:45