Google Play console reporting crashes from unreleased applications

Question

I would like to share a situation I am facing analysing the new features at Google Play console and try to find a solution for it.

As many of you may already know, Google has released updates at Google Play console and introduced Android vitals. One of the good particularities is that now the session ANRs & Crashes shows all ANRs & crashes collected from Android devices whose users have opted in to automatically share usage and diagnostics data (during phone first setup).

However, I am seeing crash reports from unreleased applications. I mean, from a developer version that hasn't been published yet. Moreover, this crash report came from an application signed with an android-debug key, not my production key. I have looked into the available documentation but I couldn't found details on the filtering for these reports.

It seems harmful and wrong to me using any income data without validating signing as anyone can simply write a short peace of code and start flooding a specific application package name with tons of dummy stacktraces.

Do you know if this is the normal behavior for this new tool ?

Answer 1

As we are interested in publishing only release applications, we may adopt following strategy to get rid of messing up crash reports :

./build.gradle :

android {
    ...
    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "my.app.package"
        ...
    }
    ...
    buildTypes {
        release {
            ...
        }
        debug {
            ...
            applicationIdSuffix ".dev"
        }
    }
...
}

Answer 2

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:

Crashes from unpublished versions will still appear on the console under the 'All versions' option.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.

Answer 3

I also faced the same issue.
It shows Crash reports when I go to All applications -> -> Dashboard -> Crashes

But if I go directly to Android Vitals -> ANRs & crashes it doesnt show anything.

Anyway for the first case you can click on 'View details' and select 'Hide' from dropdown menu for each crash type reported.

This is just a temporary fix , but I think Google has to provide proper fix for it.