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How A Simple, Stupid Error Keeps Crashing My App

A Debugging Tale of Crashes, Clues, and Careless Mistakes

Delfina 🌻

Published in

Code Like A Girl

8 min readFeb 11, 2025

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).

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…

These are the kind of situations when tests could come in really handy. Refactors are high-risk, and a pretty bullet-proof way to mitigate those risks is have tests. It doesn't even have to be unit tests, even some E2E tests for all the possible UX flows would catch this one quite easily.

Amazing write up! Have you looked into tools like Sentry? It'll record steps taken by the user before the error which can make it easier to figure out the combination that causes issues, plus it'll log it to a nice UI and give you a bunch of stats that can help triage bugs