Posting a Crash Report

If you need help investigating a crash, please include a crash report in your post. To smooth things along, follow these guidelines:

• For information on how to get a crash report, see Acquiring crash reports and diagnostic logs.

• Include the whole crash report as a text attachment (click the paperclip icon and then choose Add File). This avoids clogging up the timeline while also preserving the wealth of information in the crash report.

• If you’re not able to post your crash report as an attachment, see Can’t Post Crash Report as Attachment below.

• If you want to highlight a section of the report, include it in the main body of your post. Put the snippet in a code block so that it renders nicely. To create a code block, add a delimiter line containing triple backquotes before and after the block, or just click the Code Block button.

• If possible, post an Apple crash report. Third-party crash reporters are often missing critical information and have general reliability problems (for an explanation as to why, see Implementing Your Own Crash Reporter).

• Symbolicate your crash report before posting it. For information on how to do this, see Adding identifiable symbol names to a crash report.

• If you need to redact the crash report, do so consistently. Imagine you’re building the WaffleVarnish app whose bundle ID is com.example.wafflevarnish but you want to keep your new waffle varnishing technology secret. Replace WaffleVarnish with WwwwwwVvvvvvv and com.example.wafflevarnish with com.eeeeeee.wwwwwwvvvvvvv. This keeps the text in the crash report aligned while making it possible to distinguish the human-readible name of the app (WaffleVarnish) from the bundle ID (com.example.wafflevarnish).

Finally, for information on how to use a crash report to debug your own problems, see Diagnosing issues using crash reports and device logs.

Can’t Post Crash Report as Attachment

Crash reports have two common extensions: .crash and .ips. If you have an .ips file, please post that [1].

DevForums lets you attach a .crash file but not an .ips file (r. 117468172). To work around this, change the extension to .txt.

If DevForums complains that your crash report “contains sensitive language”, leave it out of your initial post and attach it to a reply. That often avoids this roadblock.

If you still can’t post your crash report, upload it to a file sharing service and include the URL in your post. Post the URL in the clear, per tip 14 in Quinn’s Top Ten DevForums Tips.

Share and Enjoy
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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

[1] Because it’s easy to go from an .ips file to a .crash file. I usually do this by choosing File > Quick Look in the Finder. For more info about these file formats, see this post.

Revision History:

• 2024-11-21 Added a recommendation to post the .ips format if possible.

• 2024-05-21 Added some advice regarding the “contains sensitive language” message.

• 2023-10-25 Added the Can’t Post Crash Report as Attachment section. Made other minor editorial changes.

• 2021-08-26 First posted.