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Comment by novok | Hacker News Reader

The way I've heard one company deal with noticing non-crashing bugs is to treat warning logs as 'crashes' with backtrace snapshots and upload them as specially tagged non-fatal crashes. Might help apple see if clients are having specific icloud issues.

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Apple has been doing exactly this for many years. [0] It appears to have become public API 3 years ago, but that says nothing about when it was used internally.

The difficulty is in identifying, in advance, what’s an unusual but recoverable situation, and what’s a bad bug.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/os/os_log_fault

This seems like a really good idea to me. Is it possible to do in a way that preserves privacy and doesn’t basically become a hidden “telemetry” system?

Make it opt-in and require a privacy review every time something like this goes in?

If you make it opt-in, the company will not get a lot of reports. If you want to get enough data, they should be opt-out as the others.

Opt-in analytics fail to account for people who turn them off because they don't like opt-in analytics. So you might be getting more data, but it might not necessarily be any more representative.

Well it would have the same permissions as crash reports in general? It uploads the same amount of info as normal crashes right?

Most apps send analytics up already if you are not already aware, most don't ask for your permission to do so.

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