3. Dev Center reports
The Dev Center also provides reports on your app, including the
number of downloads, payment history (for non-free applications),
ratings and reviews, and crash dumps (if any). To see these reports,
log on to the Dev Center, go to your dashboard, and then click the
Reports link. The reports page shows charts and tables of daily
downloads and crash counts for all your applications, as shown in Figure 11. You can use the Export link, to download the report in Microsoft Excel format.
It
is a certification requirement that your app should not allow any
unhandled exceptions to propagate out of the app. However, the testing
done during the ingestion process is not completely exhaustive, so it
is possible to miss some code path where an exception might escape.
This means that your app might pass certification even if it does throw
unhandled exceptions. To assist in mitigation efforts, whenever an app
crashes, a tiny crash dump is collected and sent back to Microsoft.
This eventually makes its way to the Windows Phone Store servers, where
a summary is produced and made available to the app publisher for
retrieval. Figure 12 shows a crash count report in the Dev Center.
You
can use the Export Stack Traces link to download any crash in Excel
spreadsheet format: the spreadsheets will include the stack traces for
each crash. Although these don’t provide very extensive information,
they are still quite useful for diagnosing the cause of the crash.
