Apple has been granted a patent (number 10,621,026) for “auto bug capture” with the goal of its Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and other devices being able to detect “bugs” and eliminate them without a user having to take any action.
With the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches, the typical household today has numerous electronic devices performing numerous tasks. This proliferation had also led to a proliferation of the number of applications that execute on these devices and the numbers of application vendors.
“Bugs” are a common occurrence on many of these devices, often because some of the applications are not developed properly. Also, when devices interact in an ecosystem, such interactions can cause additional unexpected bug events as it is often hard to account for all possible device interactions in all possible environments. Apple’s solution: an architecture for debugging devices that includes numerous devices that ,without user intervention, automatically detect and report bug events to a set of servers that aggregate and process the bug events. When a device detects a potential bug event, the device in some embodiments generates a description of the potential bug event, and sends the generated description to the server set through a network.
In addition to generating such a description, the device in some embodiments directs one or more of its modules to gather and store a collection of one or more data sets that are relevant to the potential bug event, in case the event has to be further analyzed by the server set. These data archives can be further analyzed to identify the root causes of the bug events.
