When you ship an app alone, you are the only person watching it break. There is no tester to flag a regression, and no on-call engineer to catch a bad release late at night. The first sign of trouble is usually a bad review or a user email that says the app keeps closing, with no device details and no way to reproduce the problem.
A good crash reporting setup gives you readable stack traces and enough context to reproduce bugs without a quality assurance team. Release-level alerts help you catch bad builds faster. Check platform support first, then compare the free tier and setup work before you choose.
Crashes that go unmonitored carry real consequences. Apps that crash on launch are removed immediately from the Apple App Store with no grace period, and uninstall rates run high in competitive categories. The right crash reporting tool turns silent failures into fixable bugs before they cost you users or revenue.
What unmonitored crashes cost you
Crashes damage ratings first. They also weaken retention and can cut into revenue. The store analytics dashboard tracks crash rate as a core metric in the same analytics view as conversion and retention data.
Retention numbers show how thin your margin for error is. Android 30-day retention sits at around 4% for shopping apps. When so few users return after a month, a recurring crash can quietly erase the base you worked to build.
Uninstall rates make the stakes clearer still. Dating apps see roughly 59% uninstalls, and gaming apps see around 52% uninstalls.
Another signal comes from Android Vitals. It now tracks low-memory kills, which are similar to crashes and can affect how people judge your app. You cannot fix what you cannot see, which is why a crash reporting tool belongs in your first release checklist.
Choose by framework before budget
Pick by framework, then budget. Start with the tool that documents your stack, because undocumented setup becomes unpaid maintenance. For native iOS and Android, Crashlytics is usually the first tool to test.
For React Native or Kotlin Multiplatform, Sentry is the safer starting point because its mobile SDKs include both. Budget comes second because a free tier only helps if crash reports arrive with readable stack traces.
Once two tools support your framework, compare event limits first. Then look at the setup work that keeps reports readable and routed to the right channel.
The tools worth your time
The best pick usually comes down to whether the tool supports the framework you ship. These options document support for the common stacks covered here.
Firebase Crashlytics documents native iOS and Android setup directly. It is available at no cost on the Spark and Blaze plans, and it adds AI-powered crash insights through Gemini. The setup documentation covers native mobile, Flutter, Unity, and Android NDK. One gap matters: React Native is not listed as a supported platform in the Crashlytics setup docs.
Sentry fits apps that need broader platform coverage. Its mobile SDKs include Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, .NET MAUI, Cordova, Capacitor, Unity, and Unreal. The free Developer plan includes one user and a 30-day retention window. If you build with React Native or Kotlin Multiplatform, this is usually your starting point.
The other options fill specific needs:
- Bugsnag supports Android, iOS, Flutter, React Native, Unity, and Web, with a free tier of 7,500 events per month. Paid plans are available for teams that need higher event volume.
- Rollbar offers a free tier of 5,000 occurrences per month plus session replays, with paid plans available for higher usage.
- Embrace focuses on session-based mobile observability. Its free tier covers 1 million sessions per year, though paid Pro carries an $80 per month minimum.
- GlitchTip is Sentry-compatible with a hosted free tier of 1,000 events per month, plus a free open-source self-hosted option.
How free tier limits compare
Free tiers vary widely, so match event volume to your actual traffic. Use the breakdown below to spot the pricing model that fits your likely failure volume.
- Firebase Crashlytics: unlimited free use at $0.
- Sentry: 5,000 errors per month free, with paid plans starting at $26/month.
- Bugsnag: 7,500 events per month free, with paid plans starting at $20/month.
- Rollbar: 5,000 occurrences/month free, with paid plans starting at $9/month.
- Embrace: 1 million sessions per year free, with a paid minimum of $80/month.
- GlitchTip (hosted): 1,000 events/month free, with paid plans starting at $15/month.
Crashlytics removes one pricing worry because it remains a no-cost product as your app grows. For a native app gaining traction, that means you will not hit a paywall the week a crash spikes. Embrace counts sessions rather than errors, so a high-traffic app with few crashes may stay free far longer than the raw numbers suggest. Compare against your own usage before assuming one tier beats another.
Matching a tool to your framework
Price only matters after a tool supports your stack. Undocumented setup can create maintenance work because you own integration, upgrades, and debugging alone. If you ship apps with an AI app builder like Anything, apply the same logic: pick the crash tool that documents the mobile target you export.
For native iOS and Android, many tools work, and Crashlytics keeps the setup path clear. The Android Kotlin setup adds the Crashlytics library through the Firebase Android BoM, drops the Gradle plugin into your root build file, and verifies with a forced test crash. It captures crashes and non-fatal errors out of the box. That includes application not responding errors (ANR).
Flutter is well covered by documented support. The available paths include:
The Crashlytics Flutter flow uses flutter pub add for the plugin, then flutterfire configure to update config and add the Gradle plugin on Android. It requires Flutter 3.12.0 or later.
The Sentry Flutter SDK goes further on performance data. It captures app start time, slow and frozen frames, user interaction, and view hierarchy.
React Native and Kotlin Multiplatform need closer attention because the field thins out:
- React Native: Sentry supports it through a dedicated React Native SDK, where you wrap the root component with
Sentry.wrap(App)and verify with a test error orSentry.nativeCrash(). Bugsnag also offers a CLI flow that handles package installation, API key injection, and mapping file upload. - Kotlin Multiplatform: Sentry covers Kotlin Multiplatform with a KMP dependency that installs automatically into your shared
commonMainsource set.
That is why React Native and Kotlin Multiplatform usually point you back to Sentry. Crashlytics does not list React Native as a supported platform in its setup documentation.
The features that actually move the needle
A few features separate a useful crash report from a dead-end stack trace. As a solo developer, you want the ones that turn a vague crash into a clear fix without hours of guesswork. Start with symbolication and breadcrumbs, then add release health so reports point to the build that caused them.
Symbolication comes first. It converts obfuscated stack traces into readable code references. Crashlytics processes dSYM files automatically on Apple platforms, while Sentry provides fully symbolicated backtraces with source map support. On Android, this is not optional. Without native debug symbols uploaded to Google Play Console, class and function-level information is absent from native stack traces entirely.
Breadcrumbs are the second high-value feature. They show what the user was doing before the crash, which is often the only path to reproducing it. Bugsnag automatically captures Android breadcrumbs, including activity lifecycle callbacks and network connectivity. It also records battery state.
Sentry records user actions and can even capture events offline or in airplane mode, then send them once the connection returns.
Release health tracking matters when you have no QA team. Sentry measures crash-free users and sessions with release-level graphs, so you can tell within hours whether a new build is more or less stable than the last. Firebase Crashlytics tracks release adoption and stability in real time as well.
Why you must configure alerts before launch
A crash tool only helps if it tells you when a bad release ships. Crashlytics does not alert you by default for the issues that hurt most. By default it only sends alerts for regressed and trending issues.
New fatals, new non-fatals, ANRs, and velocity issues are not sent unless you configure an alerting channel yourself. This misconfiguration is easy to miss. You assume the tool will tell you when something breaks, and it stays quiet while users uninstall.
Set up native integrations through Settings and Integrations. Supported integrations include:
- Slack, Jira, and PagerDuty across key event types
For custom channels or threshold-based alerts, use Cloud Monitoring or Cloud Functions.
Velocity alerts deserve specific attention. The default Crashlytics velocity alert fires when an issue exceeds 1% of sessions and 25 users inside a 30-minute window. You can set the percentage threshold anywhere from 0 to 100% and the user minimum to at least 10. Set it too low and you drown in noise. Set it too high and a real regression slips past you.
When self-hosting makes sense
Self-hosting can lower vendor cost, but it adds server maintenance. For a solo developer, compare that work against managed free tiers before you run infrastructure yourself. Evaluate self-hosting only when event volume pushes SaaS pricing higher than the cost of your own time.
GlitchTip is the lower-maintenance self-hosted option in this shortlist. Its minimum requirements are modest: 256 MB RAM minimum, an x86 or arm64 CPU, and PostgreSQL 14 or later. You can deploy it through Docker Compose, Helm, or a PaaS option. The software itself is free.
Sentry self-hosted sits at the other end. It requires 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM and 16 GB swap. It also depends on Kafka and Redis, with ClickHouse in the stack.
Its self-hosted guidance does not offer any recommendations around scaling the self-hosted version. For one person, that is a lot of infrastructure to babysit. Unless data ownership is a hard requirement, a managed free tier saves you the maintenance entirely.
A lean setup that holds up
A crash reporting workflow should catch regressions before users report them. Use this checklist before each release, especially if you do not have QA or on-call coverage. Make every crash readable and routed to the release that caused it.
- Pick by framework, then budget. Use Crashlytics for native iOS and Android, Sentry for React Native or Kotlin Multiplatform. Crashlytics publishes documented setup paths, and Sentry documents mobile SDKs you can follow without inventing your own integration.
- Configure alerts before you ship. Do not rely on Crashlytics defaults. Route new fatals, non-fatals, and ANRs to Slack or another channel you actually check.
- Upload debug symbols every release. For Android, run
crashlytics:symbols:upload --app=FIREBASE_APP_IDso your stack traces stay readable. Skip this and your reports become useless. - Add breadcrumbs to fragile flows. Instrument logs and non-fatal events around screens prone to edge-case failures like permission denials or network switches.
- Watch regressed issues after each release. Prioritize by user impact rather than raw crash count, since a crash hitting many users matters more than a rare one.
If you build for iOS deployment with Anything, choose the crash tool that matches the Expo target, then turn on alerting before release. That small setup step helps you learn about a bad build before your users do. Try Anything free and ship an app worth monitoring.
