Crashes and ANR on Android Developer Console

ANR stands for Application Not Responding. If your app is doing a lot of work on the UI thread then you'll see one of those force close/wait dialogs. That's ANR.

As for crash reporting, if your app is distributed through Google Play then crash reporting is built in. When your app crashes, the user will get a dialog with the options "Force Close" or "Report." The user has to press the Report option to send you the crash report, otherwise you may never know.

If you're not distributing through Google Play, you might want to consider a library like ACRA which will email you crash reports, upload them to a Google Docs spreadsheet, or you can write your own custom handler for dealing with crash reports.

Details about ACRA can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/acra/

Below is a sampling of what these dialogs look like. Close/report dialogs on the left and ANR on the right. Android 3.0+ is on top with the older dialogs on the bottom.

When an application crashes, a tombstone is generated. Essentially, your app needs to be aware that portions of it crashed (if you rely on some API or library that provides callbacks / status) but if it's really just your app dying - you will have a somewhat hard time figuring out whether it crashed or not.

"Error reporting" isn't a premade class you can use in android, and you may have to roll one of your own. Then again, there's ACRA - http://acra.ch/

some links:

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-feedback-for-android.html

http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/strategies/app-quality.html