Notice on Google Form Spreadsheet usage

Notice on using Google Form/Spreadsheet for reports storage

In its initial configuration, ACRA offers to send reports to a Google Docs (Drive) Form which stores reports data in a Google Docs spreadsheet.

This comes really handy when you start developing an app and can't afford spending time and/or money on hosting a reports storage engine yourself. It is free and you can rely on Google's infrastructure.

There are some limitations to the usage of Google Documents though, detailed here: http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37603

Spreadsheets are limited to 400,000 (four hundred thousands) cells, which lets you imagine receiving approximately 11,000 (eleven thousands) reports before reaching the limit.

Even if this looks like a huge number of reports, you have to be aware that:

• the UI of the spreadsheet tends to become rather slow when a large amount of data is contained in the spreadsheet
• an overloaded spreadsheet can't be opened anymore
• you won't receive any help from Google's teams to recover your spreadsheet's data

If your application is used by a large number of users, the delivery of a faulty update with a single bug experienced by a large portion of them can quickly lead to an overloaded spreadsheet.

As a consequence, using Google Drive spreadsheets should really be considered as a temporary solution for storing your reports when developing the first versions of your apps. As soon as your user base grows, you have to consider one of these solutions:

• implement and host your own reports storage engine. Even a simple script appending reports to a (daily or hourly) text file or in a database table can be enough. Instructions are provided to let you configure ACRA to send its data the way you want to receive it.
• host an already existing open source reports storage engine. See Contributions for references.
• subscribe to a plan on a third-party service like Bugsense, Zubhium or HockeyApp which provide instructions to let ACRA send them its reports. You'll get insightful analysis tools on top of a robust reports storage engine.

We are aware that all these solutions have some inconvenience, requiring you to either develop and/or host a new server-side component or to send your crash reports to a third-party service that may charge you or use your data to sell global app quality stats. We are currently working on the implementation of a backend that would be open source, easy to use and deploy, and hostable on some free hosting services... It's still in an early development state and can't be opened right now but be sure that we'll let you know when a first version is ready.