It’s coming – the release of iOS6 on September 19th. Every transition to a new hardware or software platform will cause a significant number of perfectly functioning apps to begin crashing. How will you handle all of the technical changes once your app goes into production? Here are some best practices from Crittercism.

iOS6 has some cool new features that will improve the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch experience including new mapping features with Map Kit, face recognition and camera stabilization with the Camera API, single sign on for Facebook integration, boarding passes, tickets, gift cards, and loyalty cards with Passbook and content and payments with In-App Purchasing. The iPhone 5 offers a larger display at 326 pixels per inch with 18 percent more pixels at 1136-by-640 resolution, A6 chip, 8MP iSight camera, battery optimization, all in a thinner case.

Our customers are ready for these hardware and platform changes since they have a real-time view into their iOS6 apps with Crittercism. They can quickly identify what is wrong in the code so on September 19th when iOS6 launches, they will prioritize and fix what matters immediately. This becomes an insurance policy against one star ratings and poor app reviews.

Another example is Smule, the developer of the award winning app, MagicPiano, who is using Crittercism to manage their iOS6 apps. Smule is using Crittercism for crash reporting, as well as our advanced features such as Breadcrumbs and Metadata to address the issues they are seeing in their apps as iOS6 and the new iPhone/iPods are getting ready to roll out.

Smule uses Breadcrumbs to add debugging statements to their code, inserting the API calls at points of interest in their code so they can see exactly what the user was doing and tracking valuable information passed through the variables right before a crash. Crittercism’s library automatically stores a “session_start” breadcrumb to mark the beginning of a user session, and the most recent 50 breadcrumbs that were left before a crash.

Smule is also using Metadata to add parameters to events such as in-app purchase data, shopping cart details, transaction information, location, time and event that caused an issue related to their iOS6 apps. They are attaching metadata to each user so they can identify their behavior, view trends and correlate data to specific events.  In addition, Smule plans to leverage the new Facebookintegration features in iOS6, posting status from the Notification Center, sharing scores and linking profiles.

“We use Crittercim’s Breadcrumbs and Metadata features to see in extreme detail what is happening in our code. When we launch a new app into the wild, we depend on Crittercism to give us insight into any bugs or errors in our code,” said Anthony Urso, Project Manager, Smule. “We are preparing for the launch of iOS6 and will depend on Crittercism to immediately identify what needs to be fixed so we are able to maintain our five star ratings.”