Xcode 4 failure to symbolicate Crash Log Xcode 4 failure to symbolicate Crash Log xcode xcode

Xcode 4 failure to symbolicate Crash Log


Further to coob's answer, I find adding these directories to Spotlight's ignore list (System Preferences → Spotlight → Privacy) helps:

  • ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/ (Xcode 4 build artefacts)
  • ~/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/ (file system for the iPhone Simulator)

Like this:

Spotlight settings to suppress unhelpful .app files

(See this blog post for additional detail.)

Update: from a comment by joerick: "This works, but it also meant that Instruments.app couldn't find the debug symbols, so I had to remove DerivedData from the Privacy list to do some profiling." - bear this in mind if you use Instruments.


For me, neither the line 323 edit nor the Spotlight exclusions fixed it. So I tracked down the issues in symbolicatecrash and published a patched version on github. Just replace /usr/local/bin/symbolicatecrash and your iOS crash reports will start symbolicating again.

This patch may not work for Mac apps, as it makes assumptions about the structure of the .xcarchive directory which don't appear to hold for desktop apps.

Edit: you may still have problems if Spotlight hasn't indexed your archives. You can get force an index by running the following in a terminal:

mdimport ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/Archives/

More info on troubleshooting here.


The symbolication script is having an issue finding the right binary/dSYM. It uses Spotlight to do this and often cocks up. Here's a few things to try:

  1. Make sure your .app doesn't have aspace in it.

  2. It may be finding the version ofyour app installed on the simulator(backwards, but it sometimes doesthis for me). Reset your simulator.

  3. Clear your build directory.