Application analytics and crash reporting tools have been around for a long time. The idea of application analytics is to collect data about your users, their behavior within your application, the features they use (or don't use), and how often they use the application or specific features of the application. The idea of crash reporting is to collect crash or error data from within the application. In both cases, the information collected is typically aggregated into a single dashboard-like interface so that you and other members on the application team can analyze it.

Application analytics are also extremely important to a product's life cycle and its stakeholders, as it provides real insight into the application and can help drive key business decisions around the product. For example, a feature that was thought to be very important to users might show up in analytics data as something that users are not actually using as much as anticipated. From there, the decision needs to be made whether this is because the feature is undiscoverable or simply not as important to the users as anticipated. On the other hand, analytics might indicate that a specific feature or area within your application is being used or accessed far more than expected. This would tell the product owners and developers that focusing on that feature or area should be a priority.

The power of a crash reporting tool is that it automatically captures the exception and stack trace information. Without this type of capability, you, as a developer, are left to rely on your end user to report the bug or error. In some cases, they may not even report the error and will simply close your app, and you will have no idea the bug even exists. Assuming that your users do report back to you about a bug or error they witnessed in the application, you are still relying on them to provide you with accurate information and are left trying to reproduce the error. Not only is this a potentially inaccurate process, but it is also time-consuming and cumbersome. It puts a burden on your users, as well as you and your development team. Having a crash reporting tool in place allows you to handle bugs and errors in real time, which is much faster than relying on users. If a user does experience a bug and reports it to you, having the crash reporting tool integrated within your app allows you to easily find the data related to the error they ran into. Furthermore, if you have both app analytics and crash reporting in your application, you can often leverage the analytics to identify the specific path the user took within the application before running into the issue.

There are several tools on the market, some that only do analytics, others that only do crash reporting, and, of course, some that do both. Most of the tools support .NET, and several specifically support Xamarin, making it easy to integrate them into mobile applications built with Xamarin. Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center is a service that offers analytics, error, and crash reporting tools on top of a suite of automated build, distribution and testing tools.