DevLog #004 — The Bug Nobody Reported
I set up a Google Form before I had a single tester. Somewhere to collect feedback, track who was running the app, and follow up if anything went wrong. I imagined it filling up quickly.
Testers Community filled the slots within a few days. Activity dropped as the days went on. That was expected.
Then came fourteen days of mostly silence.
One tester sent a message: the app wouldn’t launch. No device model. No error message. Nothing to go on. I made a note and kept looking. Anyone who has shipped software has seen reports like that.
The crash logs were far more useful.
Crashlytics caught something I had never reproduced in my own testing. A user opened the RevenueCat paywall, sent the app to the background, then returned. That sequence triggered a crash.
It was a corner case on a screen I use every day — but never in that order.
I fixed it and shipped an update during the closed test.
Most of the remaining bugs I found myself through normal gameplay. The testers weren’t the feedback loop I had imagined when I created that Google Form. They were something else: exposure to real devices, real usage patterns, and user behavior I would never have thought to test.
The written feedback was sparse.
The crash logs weren’t.
The testers rarely told me what was wrong.
The telemetry did.
Today, the fourteen-day closed test ended.
I submitted the app for production access.
Now it’s Google’s turn.