How A Simple, Stupid Error Keeps Crashing My App

A Debugging Tale of Crashes, Clues, and Careless Mistakes

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Let’s start with the good news.

FocusPasta, my pasta-themed Pomodoro app, has been live on the App Store for three weeks! Since then, it has received 8.68K impressions, 199 downloads, and even three paying users (including myself, of course).

Not too shabby for a first timer!

Now, on to the bad news.

In those same three weeks, there had been 15(!!!) reported crashes in FocusPasta. And that’s only from users who opted to share their usage data with developers, so the actual number is probably much higher!

How is this even possible?

Here’s the real kicker: I had no idea why this was happening.

I find it incredibly weird that FocusPasta keeps crashing. For one, we don’t force-unwrap optionals or use fatalError() in this house — we handle our errors gracefully! For two, I’ve been using FocusPasta for a few months now, along with a few beta testers on TestFlight, and FocusPasta has NEVER crashed… except that one time when a user…