Reporting crashes to Apple: any good?

[printz]

Whenever an application crashes, it asks me to view the crash dump and report it to Apple. Why? What does Apple have to do with third-party apps? Do they forward the message to the developers, if they can?

 

[Bear]

Whenever an application crashes, it asks me to view the crash dump and report it to Apple. Why? What does Apple have to do with third-party apps? Do they forward the message to the developers, if they can?

I think they do forward the crashes to developers, and I suspect they have something scanning the crashes as well to see if it's possibly an Apple issue and not the developers fault.

 

[Weaselboy]

Whenever an application crashes, it asks me to view the crash dump and report it to Apple. Why? What does Apple have to do with third-party apps? Do they forward the message to the developers, if they can?

Apple does make the crash reports available to third party developers. The dev. needs to login to their account on iTunes Connect then view details for their app and they can see crash reports like in the screenshot below.

 

[ElectronGuru]

At the scale of these reports, they also get to see patterns. Like if 100k people have the same crash in the same month and it garners more resources to solve. Or if they are already investigating a certain crash and 80% of the reports point to one cause vs 2 others they thought were the problem.

And that's not to say that I know they are doing all this but it would be a huge waste if they were not.