Troubleshooting

Troubleshoot and resolve common issues with the Android SDK.

If stack traces don't get deobfuscated properly, even though mapping files are uploaded correctly, or if Android context information is missing from events, a possible reason is that the SDK is initialized with Sentry.init instead of SentryAndroid.init.

From SDK version 8.0.0 on, using Sentry.init on Android will throw an IllegalArgumentException.

The Sentry Android SDK bundles some resources transitively from the Sentry Java SDK that are not required for Android apps. It's not possible to exclude these resources when publishing the SDK, but you can add the following snippet to your app/build.gradle file to reduce the final APK size by a bit:

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android {
  packagingOptions {
    resources {
      excludes += "META-INF/native-image/io.sentry/sentry/native-image.properties"
    }
  }
}

Since version 6.1.1 of the Sentry SDK for Android, you can opt-out of some additional device context.

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<application>
  <meta-data
    android:name="io.sentry.additional-context"
    android:value="false"
  />
</application>

More context in the PR that added this option.

The motivation for it is that some of the Android API's the Sentry SDK relies on to add additional context, can be slow in some devices. For example, the following stack traces:

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  #00  pc 000000000007550c  /apex/com.android.runtime/lib64/bionic/libc.so (syscall+28)
  #00  pc 00000000001af800  /apex/com.android.art/lib64/libart.so (art::ConditionVariable::WaitHoldingLocks(art::Thread*)+148)
  #00  pc 0000000000669f3c  /apex/com.android.art/lib64/libart.so (art::GoToRunnable(art::Thread*)+460)
  #00  pc 0000000000669d2c  /apex/com.android.art/lib64/libart.so (art::JniMethodEnd(unsigned int, art::Thread*)+28)
  at android.os.BinderProxy.transactNative (Native method)
  at android.os.BinderProxy.transact (BinderProxy.java:568)
  at android.net.IConnectivityManager$Stub$Proxy.getActiveNetwork (IConnectivityManager.java:2435)
  at android.net.ConnectivityManager.getActiveNetwork (ConnectivityManager.java:1033)
  at io.sentry.android.core.internal.util.ConnectivityChecker.getConnectionType (ConnectivityChecker.java:101)
  at io.sentry.android.core.DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.setDeviceIO (DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.java:375)
  at io.sentry.android.core.DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.getDevice (DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.java:285)
  at io.sentry.android.core.DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.setDevice (DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.java:173)
  at io.sentry.android.core.DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.setCommons (DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.java:140)
  at io.sentry.android.core.DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.process (DefaultAndroidEventProcessor.java:130)
  at io.sentry.SentryClient.processEvent (SentryClient.java:206)
  at io.sentry.SentryClient.captureEvent (SentryClient.java:88)
  at io.sentry.Hub.captureEvent (Hub.java:89)
  at io.sentry.Sentry.captureEvent (Sentry.java:262)
  at io.sentry.HubAdapter.captureEvent (HubAdapter.java:29)
  at io.sentry.IHub.captureEvent (IHub.java:39)
  at io.sentry.IHub$-CC.$default$captureEvent (IHub.java)
  at io.sentry.HubAdapter.captureEvent (HubAdapter.java:29)

Stack trace elements referring to Kotlin inline functions from files different than the call site may refer to the wrong line numbers.

This is due to a missing feature in the JVM. .class files with inline functions contain code from many source files, and when the JVM generates a stack trace, it doesn't replace the class and line where the error occurred with the original file and line number. So, when an exception is thrown in an inline function, the line number for the stack trace of the Exception may be wrong.

Let's show an example. Here is an Activity with an inline function throwing an Exception.

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class MyActivity : AppCompatActivity() {

    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
        erroringFunction() // Line 10
    }

    inline fun erroringFunction() {
        throw RuntimeException() // Line 14
    }
}
 // Line 17

The stack trace of the Exception points to the line 18 of the MyActivity.kt class.

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java.lang.RuntimeException
	at io.sentry.samples.android.MyActivity.onCreate(MyActivity.kt:18)
	at android.app.Activity.performCreate(Activity.java:8305)
	at android.app.Activity.performCreate(Activity.java:8284)
	at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1417)
	at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:3626)
	at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:3782)
	at android.app.servertransaction.LaunchActivityItem.execute(LaunchActivityItem.java:101)
	at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.executeCallbacks(TransactionExecutor.java:135)
	at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.execute(TransactionExecutor.java:95)
	at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:2307)
	at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:106)
	at android.os.Looper.loopOnce(Looper.java:201)
	at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:288)
	at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:7872)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method)
	at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:548)
	at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:936)

If you're using a version of sentry-android before 5.0, due to current limitations in how sentry-native works, it cannot identify native libraries loaded directly from .apk files. Instead, it needs to have access to the extracted libraries on the file system. This functionality is disabled by default when using an Android Gradle Plugin >= v3.6.0, and it needs to be enabled with the extractNativeLibs configuration option.

If you're using Android App Bundle, set android.bundle.enableUncompressedNativeLibs=false along with the extractNativeLibs configuration option.

In addition, sentry-native uses tagged pointers internally. As a result, the Android SDK won't work out of the box on devices with a newer Android OS because they have their own conflicting pointer tagging.

If you're using a version of sentry-android before 3.1, you must manually disable the allowNativeHeapPointerTagging configuration option because sentry-native uses tagged pointers internally. As a result, this option won't work out of the box on devices with a newer Android OS because they have their own conflicting pointer tagging. This is fixed in sentry-android versions 3.1 and above.

Example AndroidManifest.xml:

AndroidManifest.xml
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<application
  android:allowNativeHeapPointerTagging="false"
  android:extractNativeLibs="true"
>
</application>

Example gradle.properties:

gradle.properties
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android.bundle.enableUncompressedNativeLibs=false

You can set the debug log flag as an environment variable, which is picked up by the Sentry CLI. In addition, set the --stacktrace flag:

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export SENTRY_LOG_LEVEL=debug && ./gradlew app:uploadSentryProguardMappingsRelease --stacktrace

With this information, it might be more clear what's happening. If not, please consider reporting these issues on GitHub, so we can keep track of them.

The Sentry Android Gradle plugin uses bytecode manipulation to automatically measure the performance of your application. This process requires looking at the dependencies of the application, which can potentially break the build process if there are libraries which have been compiled/minified with a non-default java compiler, like R8/D8.

If you experience a "[sentry] Error while instrumenting MyClassName" error message, it could be that you are using a minified library that cannot be instrumented, as the bytecode is not compliant with the JVM spec. You can exclude such library from instrumentation as follows:

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sentry {
  tracingInstrumentation {
    enabled = true
    excludes = ['com/example/donotinstrument/**']
  }
}

You may also disable one of our instrumentations, like our File I/O instrumentation, which is usually the culprit, as follows:

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import io.sentry.android.gradle.extensions.InstrumentationFeature

sentry {
  tracingInstrumentation {
    enabled = true
    features = EnumSet.allOf(InstrumentationFeature) - InstrumentationFeature.FILE_IO
  }
}

If disabling the file I/O instrumentation feature doesn't help, you can also disable the entire bytecode manipulation logic through the tracingInstrumentation.enabled flag:

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sentry {
  tracingInstrumentation {
    enabled = false
  }
}

Please consider reporting these issues on GitHub, so we can keep track of them.

The Sentry Android Gradle plugin offers the automated installation feature of the Sentry Android SDK and the Fragment, Timber, and OkHttp integrations. Because we modify the dependency tree, this might lead to potential issues with Gradle's configuration and build phases.

If you're experiencing a StackOverflowError when trying to trigger a Gradle Sync in Android Studio or during the Gradle build, it's most likely this issue documented on the Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) site. The issue is only present in version 7.2.0 of AGP and can be fixed as follows:

Update the Sentry Android Gradle Plugin to version 3.1.3 or above:

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plugins {
    id 'io.sentry.android.gradle' version '4.14.1'
}

Or update the Android Gradle Plugin to version 7.2.1:

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plugins {
  id 'com.android.application' version '7.2.1'
}

If the problem persists, it's most likely caused by some other Gradle plugin that is processing .pom files. In this case, you can work around the problem by upgrading the sentry-android or sentry-android-core dependency to version 6.3.0 or above:

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dependencies {
  implementation 'io.sentry:sentry-android:7.19.0' // or sentry-android-core if you don't use the ndk package
}

If you're declaring a sentry-android-core:6.x dependency that's not in your main app module, but in one of the submodules, and you're using the Sentry Android Gradle Plugin version 3.1.0, the application will crash at runtime with a NoSuchMethodError. This is because the plugin will try to install the sentry-android-ndk with an incompatible version 5.7.0. To fix this problem, you can update the Sentry Android Gradle Plugin to version 3.1.1 or above:

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plugins {
    id 'io.sentry.android.gradle' version '4.14.1'
}

Alternatively, you can tell the plugin to use your version of the Sentry NDK:

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sentry {
  autoInstallation {
    sentryVersion = '6.0.0' // or whatever version you use for `sentry-android-core`
  }
}

This problem is only relevant to these specific versions: sentry-android-core version 6.+ and sentry-android-gradle-plugin version 3.1.0.

Check this issue for more details.

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