Ever had a mobile app crash on you? If you haven't, you probably don't run many – and come to think about it, why are you reading this blog? But according to the data from networks around the world, a lot more people have this happen than you might think.

As part of the ongoing preview into some of the tidbits that might not make the main Global Internet Phenomena report, a specific bit of data jumped out at me – a heavy device user – as I went through the data. Maybe not daily (but what feels like all too frequently), an app crashes and you get a pop-up on your device for something like "Sending crash report." How much data is that using? If I'm on a quota for an operator, not only am I spending valuable bytes on downloading and using an app but also using even more – apparently – when it crashes.

When I saw Crashlytics in the Phenomena data, the name certainly caught my attention: it was the first application on the list that I did not recognize, which always catches my eye, but it also ranked 40th worldwide in total number of connections.

Wikipedia's summarizes Crashlytics as "a Google-owned Boston, Massachusetts-based software company [...] Its main product is a software development kit for crash reporting, application logging, online review and statistical analysis of application logs. It supports iOS, Android and Unity."  These are pretty significant numbers for what is essentially defined as an "infrastructure" service.

Think of what happens in a crash: the application crashes, dumps its state to memory, and then "phones home" that data so that the developer can fix the problem. If 0.32% of all connections on the internet are "phoning home," and the data in that "call" makes up 0.05% of all traffic upstream, that is significant. Significant enough to rank ahead of Siri for upstream usage and Twitter and Nest on connection usage.

Tomorrow we'll look at another tidbit of data from the upcoming Global Internet Phenomena Report, which will be released on October 2nd. We'll also be hosting a webinar discussing the report on its release date – keep an eye out for a registration link in our upcoming blog posts going forward as you stay tuned for more Phenomena tidbits!

If you missed yesterday's blog on Ookla Speedtest's impact on the internet, check it out here: https://www.sandvine.com/blog/global-internet-phenomena-report-preview-ookla-speedtest