Using Timber and Bugfender to get the most out of your Android logs

If you are familiar with Bugfender, you already know that it is possible to capture the logs sent to NSLog in iOS in order to send them to our cloud storage service.

Something we realized while making the Android version is that a lot of applications do not log to logcat when compiled for release. This poses a problem if we try to mimic the iOS SDK and capture the logs sent to logcat.

Here is when Timber comes in handy: according to their GitHub repository, Timber is “A logger with a small, extensible API which provides utility on top of Android’s normal Log class”. One of such utilites is the possibility of writing your own logger implementation (what in Timber is called a Tree):

This has proven very useful. We now have a double benefit: we have a decoupled implementation from the Android Logger, plus we can send logs to Bugfender with only adding the Tree to our logger instance.

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To make it clear, it is not necessary at all to use Timber in order to use Bugfender, but Timber is a nice abstraction of the standard logger that brings you some flexibility and makes installing Bugfender a single line of code!

Timber.plant(new BugfenderTree(logger));

If you like this idea, sign up for a free Bugfender account right now and start using Timber or any other logger to upload your logs to the cloud.