Even before Google IO 2023 kicks off you can find new products and features leaking out of Google’s software and repositories. In particular, Firebase is now highlighting several new features in its Extensions, Functions and Crashlytics products.

The new Crashlytics offering is called Variants and is designed to help developers when debugging reported issues. It breaks each issue down based on the number of different unique stack traces – or Variants – that lead to the same non-fatal error, crash or ANR.

While all events in an issue have a common point of failure, the stack trace leading to the failure might be different. A variant is a group of events that have the same failure point and a similar stack trace.

— Firebase Crashlytics’ introduction to Variants

On the Crashlytics home screen each issue will indicate in blue text the number of variants that exist.

In the details screen we are then presented with a tab for each Variant, allowing us to filter and compare the different paths that lead to the issue.

For example, we might log a non-fatal error whenever our app cannot retrieve user credentials from Android’s Smart Lock storage service. With Variants we can easily see in which parts of the login flow this occurs and the different steps leading to each.

Where we previously might trawl through hundreds of stack traces in Crashlytics, Variants condenses it down to only a handful of similar logs for us to review!

Check out the Google IO talk What’s New in Firebase for more information.