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If you’ve ever filed a bug report for an app, you’ve likely been asked to provide as much information as possible. One specific, and helpful piece of that information, is a crash report (assuming the bug resulted in a crash). The crash report contains information about the app (name, version, build number), the device (iOS version, hardware model), the crash (when it occurred and what processes were running at the time of occurrence), and any exceptions that were noted at the time of the crash.

A quick search for “find crash log on iPhone” or similar, may result in some older articles that suggest plugging in your device to your Mac and browsing for the crash reports in Finder. That’s no longer necessary. The current method of retrieving crash logs is simple, but hidden away in a not-so-intuitive place in Settings.

Here’s how to find your crash logs:

Go to Settings > Privacy > Analytics > Analytics Data

Then scroll through the list of Analytics Data (aka crash reports) and look for the name of the app that crashed. Once you select a crash report, you’ll see the information mentioned above (and tons more). There’s also a convenient Share icon to send that crash report off to your friendly app developer who will promptly fix your bug!

I went to dust off Android Studio since it had been some time since I’ve worked on Android. I created a new project, with just a single empty activity and clicked ‘Run’. Here’s what I got:

Cannot launch AVD in emulator.

and…

Failed to open vm 3
Failed to create HAX VM
No accelerator found.
failed to initialize HAX: Invalid argument
Hax is enabled
Hax ram_size 0x60000000

In other words, World was not greeted with it’s due “Hello.” Not surprised. This is really why I was attempting to run something. To get past these inevitable blockers that slow us down every time we want just get coding.

After some googling, I was led to the SDK Manager (from the Android Studio toolbar, select Tools > Android > SDK Manager. There, under the SDK Tools tab, I noticed that Android Emulator was not checked; thus, not installed.

So, after checking the Android Emulator box and clicking ‘OK’, the necessary components downloaded and I was ready to try again.

The result: “Hello, World”!

Now, let’s get coding.